Definition
To cite or summon a person before a tribunal; specifically, in early medieval Germanic and Frankish legal practice, to bring a party formally before a court or judicial assembly for adjudication. The term denotes the act of instituting a legal proceeding by formal call or challenge, placing the summoned party under obligation to appear and answer.
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Common Confusion
ADMALLARE should not be confused with ADMEASUREMENT or ADMEASUREMENT OF PASTURE, a distinct common law writ remedy. The conflation appears to have occurred within the Burrill source text itself. ADMEASUREMENT OF PASTURE was a writ commanding a sheriff to apportion rights of common among competing claimants where one had overstocked the common. It is an English common law remedy with a specific procedural history, entirely separate from the Germanic procedural act denoted by ADMALLARE.
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Why It Matters in Research
ADMALLARE is an archaic term of Latin origin encountered almost exclusively in sources treating early Germanic law, Frankish legal custom, and medieval ecclesiastical or feudal procedure. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working through secondary treatises on the history of European law, glossaries appended to medieval legal texts, or comparative legal history scholarship dealing with the transition from Roman to Germanic procedural forms.
The term has essentially no operative presence in English common law sources. Its appearance in English-language legal dictionaries is a function of those dictionaries' ambition to capture civil law and antiquarian vocabulary rather than any practical use in English courts. A researcher who encounters ADMALLARE in a primary source is almost certainly working with a Carolingian, Lombard, Salic, or similar continental source, or with a modern scholarly discussion of those traditions.
The source material provided with this entry, drawn from Burrill's Law Dictionary, appears to conflate or run together content from a different term — the surrounding text references writs, surcharging of commons, admeasurement, and Blackstone's Commentaries. This strongly suggests a printing or transcription artifact in the dictionary itself, where content from an adjacent entry (likely ADMEASUREMENT or ADMEASUREMENT OF PASTURE) was inadvertently merged with or attached to the ADMALLARE entry. Researchers relying on digitized or OCR-processed versions of Burrill should be alert to this type of structural corruption. Verify any Burrill entry for rare terms against a physical copy or a clean scan before treating the surrounding text as belonging to the headword.
Because ADMALLARE operates at the boundary of legal Latin, historical linguistics, and medieval procedure, it rarely appears in legal dictionaries beyond the most comprehensive antiquarian collections. Its coverage in English-language sources is thin and sometimes imprecise.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary includes ADMALLARE as part of its effort to catalog Latin and civil law terminology alongside common law vocabulary. The entry, as recoverable from the available source material, situates the term in its procedural context — the formal act of summoning or citing a party — consistent with its use in early medieval legal sources.
The surrounding text in the Burrill source material plainly belongs to a different entry, most likely ADMEASUREMENT OF PASTURE (a writ directed to a sheriff concerning surcharging of common, referenced to Blackstone's Commentaries 3:238, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium 125B, Termes de la Ley, and Crabb's Real Property). This contamination is a research hazard, not a meaningful part of the ADMALLARE definition. Blackstone's treatment of admeasurement writs is legitimate and findable at the cited location; it simply does not bear on ADMALLARE.
No broader agreement or divergence among historical dictionary sources can be assessed here because only Burrill is available in the corpus for this term. Researchers needing fuller treatment should consult Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, which remains the authoritative reference for medieval Latin legal terminology of this type, and Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum for Anglo-Latin and feudal vocabulary.
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