Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning to purge an offense by oath. The term describes the act of clearing oneself of a charge or accusation through a formal sworn declaration of innocence, rather than through trial by evidence or combat. It belongs to the vocabulary of early medieval compurgation procedure, in which an accused person could be acquitted by swearing — often alongside a required number of oath-helpers or compurgators — that the accusation was false.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records, year books, and antiquarian legal commentaries. Researchers encountering it in manuscript sources, plea rolls, or early printed abridgments should understand it as a procedural marker, not a substantive legal claim. It signals that the document describes a compurgatory proceeding — a mode of trial that was formally abolished in England by statute in the nineteenth century but remained present in ecclesiastical and manorial court records long after it had faded from common law practice.
The practical research trap is treating accredulitare as synonymous with any general oath-taking or affirmation. It is specifically tied to purgation — the clearing of an existing charge — not to oath-swearing in a testimonial or contractual sense. Researchers working in ecclesiastical court records should be aware that purgation by oath persisted in church courts on a different timeline than in common law courts, so the term may appear in contexts that feel anachronistically late.
Because the term appears in secondary authorities primarily through citation to Blount's Glossographia and Whishaw's New Law Dictionary, researchers should be cautious about tracing its usage back through those sources rather than assuming independent primary authority. Both Blount and Whishaw were antiquarian compilers, and the entry in Black's and Burrill's tracks directly to their work without independent analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: all three define accredulitare identically as the act of purging an offense by oath in old records, and all three cite Blount and Whishaw as authority. There is no substantive divergence among the historical sources on this point, which reflects the term's narrow scope — it was never a living term of art generating competing interpretations, but rather a historical curiosity preserved in legal glossaries.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is procedural context. None of the three entries explains the mechanics of compurgation, the number of oath-helpers typically required, or the courts in which the procedure was employed. For that context, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf to historical treatises on English legal procedure. The entries are faithful as far as they go, but they go only a short distance.
The minor typographical variation in the second edition of Black's — rendered as "IL. Iat." rather than "L. Lat." — appears to be a printing artifact rather than any meaningful distinction, and both editions carry identical substantive content.