Definition
A Latin term from the medieval legal vocabulary of maritime and commercial law, meaning "freighted" — that is, loaded with cargo, or having a freight engagement in place. The term describes a vessel that has been chartered or laden with goods under a contract of affreightment, signifying that the ship is committed to carrying a specified cargo for hire.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in early English plea rolls, entry books, and pleading forms — the kind of formulaic Latin that populated common law records through the early modern period. Its appearance signals a maritime or carriage dispute, and researchers should treat it as a flag pointing toward underlying questions of freight contracts, carrier liability, or charter party arrangements, even when those subjects are not named directly.
The term belongs to the family of Law Latin that fell out of active use following the English statute requiring proceedings in English (4 Geo. II, c. 26, 1731), after which terms like affrectatus largely disappeared from live pleading and survived only in form books and older reported cases. A researcher reading pre-1731 English maritime pleadings should expect this vocabulary; post-1731 materials will use English equivalents.
The connection to affreightment (the contract by which a shipowner agrees to carry goods) is etymological and conceptual. Affrectatus is the adjectival or past participial form describing the condition produced by such a contract — the ship or cargo is "freighted." Researchers working on the history of affreightment contracts should treat Burrill's entry as a minimal placeholder and supplement it with broader maritime law sources, since the dictionary entry itself offers little more than the translation and two form-book citations.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus, and it is brief to the point of sparseness: the definition is simply "Freighted," followed by citations to Rastell's Entries (Rast. Entr. 409) and Townshend's Pleadings (Towns. Pl. 50). These are early English form books — Rastell's Entries being a sixteenth-century collection of precedents for pleading — confirming that affrectatus was a term of art in formal legal drafting rather than substantive doctrine.
No competing or supplementary definition exists in the corpus. The term does not appear to have attracted significant commentary in later dictionaries, likely because it was rendered obsolete by the shift to English-language pleading and the consolidation of freight law under the more durable heading of affreightment. Researchers should not read Burrill's silence on doctrine as evidence that the underlying legal concept was undeveloped — freight contracts had a sophisticated body of law by the early modern period — but rather that affrectatus itself was a pleading term, not a doctrinal one.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears in English legal sources and reflects the Law Latin conventions of English common law pleading. It is unlikely to appear in American sources except in historical materials predating or closely following independence, where English form books were still in use.