Definition
To compel or burden with exactions; specifically, to force a person into involuntary service or to impose compulsory obligations upon them. The term appears in old Latin records and ecclesiastical sources as a verb describing the act of pressing individuals or their property into obligatory use, typically by a superior authority. It is the verbal form of the legal concept underlying angary — the right of a belligerent or sovereign power to seize and compel the use of neutral or subject property and persons.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering angariare in medieval records, ecclesiastical documents, or glossed manuscripts should treat it as a verb of compulsion with a specific legal register: it describes the exercise of a coercive sovereign or feudal right, not mere request or contract. The term is almost entirely confined to Latin records of the medieval and early modern periods and will not appear in modern case law or statutes under this form.
The practical research path runs through the noun forms — angaria, angariae, and the anglicized angary — which carry the substantive doctrine forward into international law and admiralty contexts. Angariare itself is a terminus in historical records; if you are finding it in a source, you are working in a Latin-language document from the feudal or ecclesiastical tradition, and the surrounding text likely concerns labor obligations, requisition of transport, or imposed burdens on subject persons or property.
Note that the scriptural connection flagged by Burrill is not merely decorative. The Greek root ἀγγαρεύω (angareuō) — meaning to compel, press into service — appears in the New Testament (Matthew 5:41, the passage about being compelled to carry a burden one mile), which influenced how canonists and glossators understood and transmitted the term into Latin legal usage. Ecclesiastical sources may therefore use angariare in a moral or rhetorical register as well as a strictly legal one, and researchers working in canon law or patristic commentary should be alert to that dual valence.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source available on this term, and his entry is characteristically spare: he gives the Latin root, the Greek derivation, the meaning ("to compel; to burden with exactions"), a cross-reference to Spelman, and the scriptural citation. This is consistent with the term's narrow utility — it is a word encountered rather than a doctrine analyzed.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the deeper reference Burrill points toward. Spelman's treatment of angaria and related forms gives the fuller feudal and Roman law context: the angaria was a system of compulsory transport service owed by subjects to the state, originating in Roman imperial practice and continuing through feudal land tenure obligations. Angariare is the verbal expression of that right being exercised. Other historical dictionaries of legal Latin — Du Cange's Glossarium in particular — treat the noun forms extensively but give the verb in passing, treating it as self-evident from the noun.
What the historical sources collectively miss is any sustained treatment of how the doctrine migrated into international law as the right of angary (the belligerent right to seize neutral vessels or property in port). That development belongs to later publicists and is not visible in the sources that handle angariare as a word.