Definition
An archaic Latin term of Greek origin appearing in old English legal records. To be in difficulties; to be in a state of poverty or want; also, to reduce another to poverty. Used in medieval record-keeping to describe a condition of financial distress or destitution, whether suffered by a party or imposed upon one.
Common Confusion
The headword entry in Burrill's Law Dictionary runs together two unrelated terms: APORIARE and APOI (L. Fr., meaning "almost" or "scarcely"). These are distinct words from different linguistic traditions — the first Greco-Latin, the second Law French — and share no meaning or derivation. Researchers encountering a run-on entry in Burrill or similar digest formats should take care not to conflate them.
Why It Matters in Research
APORIARE is effectively a dead term outside of medieval record transcription and paleographic work. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working with early English court rolls, plea rolls, or manorial records where Latin was the language of entry. In that context, it may appear as a descriptor of a party's legal or financial incapacity — relevant, for example, to questions of whether a litigant could be held to a debt, required to find sureties, or excused from certain obligations due to indigence.
The term does not survive into modern legal usage. It has no statutory presence and will not appear in reported cases in any operative sense. Its primary research value is interpretive: understanding what a medieval scribe meant when recording a party's condition in proceedings touching debt, tenure, or obligation.
Researchers working in Law French sources should be alert to the fact that APORIARE and APOI appear in close proximity in several dictionary sources purely by alphabetical accident. A document containing the Law French APOI carries no financial or poverty-related meaning whatsoever.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary authority here, and its entry is thin. Burrill traces the term to Greek (ἀπορέω, to be in doubt or perplexity, want, or difficulty) and routes it through Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum — a seventeenth-century glossary of medieval Latin terms used in English records — as the underlying authority. Spelman's Glossarium is a credible and well-regarded source for this class of term, and Burrill's reliance on it is appropriate.
No other major historical law dictionary in the standard shelf — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — carries a substantive entry for APORIARE. Its absence from those sources underscores that the term was already archaic by the time systematic legal lexicography was underway in the nineteenth century. Burrill, which cast a wider net for Latinate and record-derived terms than most of its contemporaries, preserves it largely as a matter of scholarly completeness.
The Greek root (ἀπορία — perplexity, want, lack of resources) is philosophically significant in other traditions (notably in Socratic and later scholastic usage), but that intellectual lineage has no bearing on the narrow record-keeping usage documented here.
Jurisdictional Note
APORIARE is specific to English medieval legal records and does not appear to have been adopted in continental European legal Latin practice in any comparable documentary sense. Its geographic scope is effectively limited to England in the period when Latin was the language of formal record, roughly from the Norman period through the sixteenth century.