Why It Matters in Research
This term is a textbook example of a transcription error propagating through a legal literature chain. Researchers encountering ARNALIA in historical legal texts, digests, or indices should not treat it as a distinct legal concept. It is an artifact of pre-typeset manuscript copying and early print reproduction, where compositors and copyists reproduced terms without verification. The operative entry is ARALIA (or ARVALIA), and any research thread that has led to ARNALIA should be redirected there.
The broader research lesson: historical legal dictionaries, particularly those compiled from earlier dictionaries, are susceptible to laundering errors. A term appearing in multiple books does not confirm its legitimacy — it may only confirm that multiple compilers drew from the same flawed source. Burrill's explicit flagging of this misprint is precisely the kind of critical annotation that distinguishes a rigorous historical dictionary from a mere accumulation of entries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source dictionary to address this term, and it does so dismissively and correctly: ARNALIA is identified outright as a misprint with no substantive definition offered. Burrill further notes that the error was "copied in many of the books," suggesting it circulated in secondary and tertiary legal reference works during the period. No definition is attributed to ARNALIA itself because none exists. Burrill redirects immediately to ARALIA.
This entry exemplifies a recurring problem in early Anglo-American legal lexicography: the absence of a fact-checking mechanism across the dictionary-publishing tradition meant that errors, once introduced, could achieve apparent legitimacy through repetition alone.