Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law and early English practice meaning "to appeal" or "to accuse." In its most direct sense, appellare denotes the act of calling upon a higher authority — whether a court or a sovereign — to review a decision or to charge another person with a wrong. In old English practice, the term carried a more specific and accusatory meaning: to formally appeal, that is, to accuse another person of a criminal act, particularly felony. This usage predates the modern procedural concept of appeal and is closer in function to a formal accusation or criminal charge brought by a private party.
Bracton's usage illustrates the term's dual character. A. appellat B. de morte C. fratris sui — "A. appeals B. of the death of C. his brother" — is not an appeal of a judicial ruling but a criminal accusation brought by a private appellant against an alleged wrongdoer. The mechanism belongs to the old common law institution of the appeal of felony, in which a private individual initiated criminal proceedings by personal accusation.
Two specific forms of the accusation appear in Bracton's text:
- Appellare de facto: to appeal one of fact, meaning to accuse as a principal actor in the crime.
- Appellare de fortia: to appeal of force, meaning to accuse as an accessory — one who aided or compelled the act.
Common Confusion
Modern readers will almost certainly interpret appellare through the lens of its modern descendant, appeal — meaning a request for judicial review of a lower court's decision. That meaning is present in the term's history but is not its primary significance in the sources where it appears. When encountered in Bracton or other medieval Latin legal texts, appellare most often signals a private criminal accusation, not a procedural appeal in the contemporary sense. Conflating the two meanings will produce a misreading of the source. The criminal accusation function of the term was largely abolished in English law by the early nineteenth century; by that point, the word's surviving legal meaning had narrowed entirely to the procedural sense.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern common law sources — Bracton in particular — must recognize that appellare and its English derivative "appeal" carried a criminal accusation meaning that has no direct modern counterpart. A passage stating that one party "appeals" another does not describe a review of a court ruling; it describes a private prosecution. Failure to recognize this will produce a fundamental misreading of the text and the legal context it describes.
The distinction between appellare de facto and appellare de fortia is practically significant: the two forms carried different procedural consequences and reflected the civil law distinction between principal and accessory liability. When a medieval source uses one form rather than the other, the choice communicates the accused party's alleged role in the offense.
Researchers should also be alert to the broader institutional context: the appeal of felony (appellum de felonia) was a recognized form of private criminal prosecution in English law, separate from the Crown's pleas. Appellare in Bracton sits within that institution. Cross-referencing with sources on the appeal of felony, approvers, and private prosecution will clarify the procedural framework in which the term operates.
Because Burrill is the sole source dictionary here, researchers should treat his entry as a starting point and verify usage directly in Bracton, fol. 138, where the examples quoted originate.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is concise but accurate. He correctly situates the term in both civil law and old English practice, and he correctly distinguishes the de facto and de fortia forms by reference to principal and accessory liability. His illustrative phrase — A. appellat B. de morte C. fratris sui — traces directly to Bracton and is a reliable representation of the term's usage in that source.
What Burrill does not develop is the institutional history of the appeal of felony itself, or the connection between the civil law use of appellare (as a general term for invoking higher authority) and the specifically English criminal accusation usage. The two strands share etymology and some conceptual overlap, but they belong to different procedural traditions. Researchers relying solely on Burrill's entry may not appreciate that gap.
No other shelf dictionaries contributed entries for this term. Additional coverage would be found in Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis for the civil and medieval Latin usage, and in specialized treatments of Bracton's Latin vocabulary.