Definition
An archaic Anglo-French legal term appearing in early common law sources with two related but distinct senses:
1. (Substantive) An account or reckoning; a record of charges or financial accountability, particularly as used in exchequer proceedings.
2. (Adjectival/participial) Taken or charged with a crime; accused or imputed with an offense. In this sense, a person described as aret was one formally charged or held to answer.
The term is closely associated with ARRET and likely represents a variant spelling or abbreviated form of the same root concept in Anglo-Norman legal usage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To impute something as a fault to or upon someone.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To reckon; to ascribe; to impute. [Obsolete.]
The ordinary English sense of imputation or attribution overlaps with the legal sense of being charged with a crime, but the legal usage is narrower and procedural — it describes a formal state of accusation or accountability within a legal proceeding, not merely the informal assignment of blame.
Common Confusion
ARET and ARRET are easily conflated, and Burrill's own entry cross-references Arret immediately after defining Aret. The two terms likely share a common Anglo-French root, but Arret carries the additional meaning of a formal judgment or decree (particularly in French and Scots law), while Aret appears in English sources more narrowly as an accusation or exchequer account. Researchers encountering either spelling in manuscript or early printed sources should treat them as potentially interchangeable without assuming the specific legal valence of one over the other until context confirms it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal materials — Year Books, plea rolls, exchequer records, and early treatises drawing on Anglo-Norman vocabulary. Researchers should be aware of several navigational challenges:
Spelling instability is significant. Anglo-French legal terms were transcribed inconsistently across centuries, and aret, arret, arrete, and arete may appear as variants of the same operative word in different manuscripts or printed sources. Full-text searches keyed to a single spelling will miss cognate occurrences.
The dual sense (account vs. accusation) means that the same word in two different procedural contexts carries materially different meaning. In exchequer records, aret signals a financial accounting obligation. In criminal or plea records, it signals a charge or accusation. Context — the nature of the proceeding and the surrounding Latin or French terms — is the only reliable guide.
The Burrill entry is thin and gestures toward Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum for the exchequer sense, suggesting that researchers needing depth on this term should move to Spelman rather than relying on Burrill alone.
By the time legal English consolidated in the early modern period, aret had dropped from active use. It is not a term one encounters in post-seventeenth-century legal writing, and modern legal dictionaries do not carry it. Its presence in a document is itself a dating signal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source providing a legal definition of this term. The entry is notably compressed, offering two senses without extended explanation and cross-referencing both Arret and Spelman. This brevity suggests Burrill treated the term as derivative or subordinate rather than independently significant.
The Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary entries confirm that the common English sense of the root word — imputation, ascription, reckoning — survived in non-legal use into the nineteenth century as an archaism, largely through Chaucer and similar literary sources. This literary survival is useful for researchers: it means that the conceptual core of the term (charging something to someone's account, whether financial or moral) was intelligible to educated nineteenth-century readers even if the legal term itself had long since fallen out of practice.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — appear to carry a standalone entry for aret. Its absence from those sources reinforces its status as a specialist term of early Anglo-Norman procedure rather than a term of general common law currency.
Jurisdictional Note
Aret in its exchequer sense is an English term tied to the Court of Exchequer and its Anglo-Norman administrative vocabulary. The related term Arret, however, has a separate life in Scots law and French law as a formal judicial decree. Researchers working in Scottish or French legal history should consult entries specific to those traditions rather than treating the English aret as a guide to usage there.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ARRET; EXCHEQUER; ACCUSATION (Historical Forms)