ACHATA

Definition

In old English law, a purchase, contract, or bargain. The term appears in both Latinized form (achata) and Law French variants (achate, achat, achet, acate) and refers generally to the act of buying or the transaction resulting from it. The related verb form, achater or acater, means simply to buy. The term carries a narrow compound use worth noting: achate arere means bought back — that is, a repurchase or redemption by the original seller.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current entry. The term is obsolete in ordinary English. Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the nineteenth century the term had passed entirely out of common circulation. Editorial note: There is no meaningful gap between common and legal usage to navigate because the term has no surviving common meaning. Researchers encountering it in historical sources should treat it as technical vocabulary of medieval English law with no modern vernacular counterpart.

Common Confusion

Achata is easily confused with acates, a related but distinct term referring to provisions or food purchased for a household — the domain of the acater or caterer (a royal or noble provisioner). The shared root can cause misreading in manorial and household accounts. A reference to achata in a legal record concerns a transaction or conveyance; a reference to acates or the acater concerns the purchase of foodstuffs for domestic supply. The modern word caterer descends from acater by this provisioning sense, not from the legal-transactional sense of achata.

Why It Matters in Research

This term appears almost exclusively in records from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries — pipe rolls, plea rolls, and early English statutes. Researchers working in that stratum should expect orthographic instability: achata, achate, achat, achet, and acate are all attested variants, and a search limited to one spelling will miss the others. The phrase per colour de achate — by color of purchase — is the legally significant compound. It appears in Statute of Westminster I (1275) and signals a pretextual or fraudulent claim to property made under the guise of a legitimate purchase. A document using this phrase is not recording an ordinary sale; it is recording an allegation of abuse or evasion. Researchers who read achata only as a neutral synonym for "purchase" will misread the legal force of that phrase entirely. The term belongs to the same conceptual cluster as other early conveyancing vocabulary. Because Law French and Latinized Law French coexisted in English legal records through the medieval period, the same transaction might be described using achata in one document and emptio or venditio in a Latin record from the same proceeding. Corpus researchers should coordinate searches accordingly.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill is the primary source for this term in the Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition, and his entry is reliable as a starting point. He correctly identifies both the Latin and Law French forms, provides the key compound phrase (per colour de achate), and cites Statute of Westminster I as authority — a genuine and verifiable reference. His citation to the Magna Rotulus Pipae of 1 Henry II and to Spelman's glossary grounds the term in twelfth-century administrative record-keeping. Burrill's entry for achate arere (bought back) rests on a citation to Dyer's Reports in the French edition — a legitimate source, though not one most modern researchers will have ready access to. The phrase signals an early form of what later law would treat under redemption or repurchase doctrines. No modern legal dictionary carries this term, and Burrill's treatment, while brief, is the fullest available synthesis in the Anglo-American tradition. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary do not appear to have independent entries of substance on this term.

Jurisdictional Note

This term belongs to English legal history exclusively. It has no independent development in American law and does not appear in colonial or early republic legal records as a term of art. It is relevant only to researchers working with English sources predating roughly 1500.

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