Definition
A Latin verb used in medieval English legal practice carrying three closely related meanings depending on context:
1. To affix or set to. Used in procedural directives requiring an official act of authentication, most commonly the affixing of a seal by a judicial officer. The formula justitiarii apponant sigilla sua — the justices shall affix their seals — appears in the Statute of Westminster II as a requirement for authenticating judicial records.
2. To put in or set up (a claim). Used in the formal language of fines of lands, the medieval conveyancing procedure by which title to real property was transferred through a fictitious court proceeding. The phrase appono clameum meum (I set up my claim) was the prescribed form spoken by the claimant in that proceeding.
3. To appoint. A less procedurally specific usage appearing in Bracton, where the term carries the general sense of designating a person to an office or function.
All three meanings share a common root sense: the placing or putting of something — a seal, a claim, a person — in an official or formal position.
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Common Confusion
Apponere and its English derivative "appoint" share the same Latin lineage, but researchers should resist reading modern appointment language back into medieval uses of apponere. When the term appears in Bracton or Fleta, context determines whether it signals a procedural act (affixing, claiming) or a designatory one (appointing). The three meanings are not interchangeable, and conflating them distorts the legal act being described.
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Why It Matters in Research
Apponere is a term of medieval practice, not modern doctrine. Researchers will encounter it exclusively in primary sources from the period of early English common law — principally Bracton, Fleta, and statutes from the reign of Edward I — or in secondary works synthesizing that era. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law.
The term's chief research value is interpretive. Understanding that appono clameum meum was the operative formula in a fine of lands helps researchers decode conveyancing records and legal narratives from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, when the fine remained a principal method of transferring and recording land titles. The formula's precise wording mattered: it was the act that initiated the claimant's part of the fictional legal proceeding.
The sealing usage — justitiarii apponant sigilla sua — is significant for records research. Seal authentication was not a formality but a legal requirement for the validity of certain instruments under Westminster II. Researchers working with medieval judicial records should recognize that the presence or absence of a seal had procedural consequences, and apponere in this context signals that a specific authentication act was legally required.
The term is largely absent from later legal dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reflecting the obsolescence of the fines procedure (formally abolished in England in 1833) and the general retreat from Latin as the language of English legal practice. Burrill preserves it as a term of historical record, not active use.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is concise but precise. Burrill correctly identifies three distinct usages and supplies primary source references for each: the Statute of Westminster II (c. 31) for the sealing formula, Bracton (fol. 436) and Fleta (lib. 6, c. 53) for the claims formula, and Bracton again for the appointment sense. He also cites Reeves' History of English Law for context on the fine of lands procedure.
Burrill does not editorialize on which usage predominated, but the claims formula receives the most detailed treatment, suggesting it was the most procedurally distinctive. The sealing usage would have been routine enough across medieval instruments that it required less explanation.
No other standard legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — carries an entry for apponere, which underscores its status as a term belonging to the scholarly reconstruction of medieval practice rather than to any living legal vocabulary. Researchers relying solely on post-seventeenth-century dictionaries would find no entry at all.
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