Definition
A Latin term from medieval English legal usage meaning to array or set in order. The term appears in old English legal records and pleadings to describe the act of marshaling, ordering, or arranging — most commonly in the military sense of preparing or deploying armed forces in battle formation. Its participial form, *arraiatus*, means "arrayed" and appears in legal documents describing persons or forces as having been arranged or drawn up, particularly in a warlike manner.
The term is effectively a Latinized form of the Anglo-French and Middle English word "array," adapted for use in formal legal and judicial records.
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Why It Matters in Research
ARRAIARE is encountered almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records — pleadings, rolls, and writs — rather than in substantive doctrine. Researchers working with Year Books, plea rolls, or Keilwey's Reports may encounter this term and its participial forms in factual recitations describing the manner in which defendants or parties were alleged to have assembled or acted.
The phrase *modo guerrino arraiata* — "arrayed in warlike manner" — is particularly significant for researchers tracing the historical pleading conventions in actions involving riot, rout, unlawful assembly, or forcible entry. These causes of action frequently required pleaders to allege that defendants had gathered *vi et armis* (with force and arms) and in a manner resembling a military formation, and ARRAIARE supplied the verb for that allegation. Understanding this term is therefore essential for parsing the formulaic Latin of medieval English pleadings, where the specific language of force and warlike assembly carried legal consequences for the nature of the action and the remedies available.
Researchers should note that this is a term of pleading and factual description, not a term defining a substantive legal right or duty. It will not appear in doctrinal discussions but will surface in the raw text of historical sources. Its appearance in a pleading is a signal that the drafter was invoking the register of forcible or violent assembly, which connects it to the broader cluster of medieval public order law.
The term has no modern successor in legal usage. Contemporary legal instruments have no equivalent Latin formula, and the pleading conventions that gave ARRAIARE its context were abolished progressively through procedural reforms culminating in the nineteenth century.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical shelf source to treat this term, and its entry is brief: it provides the definition ("to array; to set in order"), the participial form (*arraiatus*), and two illustrative citations — Townshend's Pleadings (p. 215) and Keilwey's Reports (p. 82). The Keilwey citation supplies the key phrase *modo guerrino arraiata*, grounding the term specifically in the warlike-assembly context.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions, not Jacob's Law Dictionary — appear to have treated ARRAIARE as a headword, suggesting it was recognized as a term of sufficiently specialized and archaic usage that most compilers passed over it. Burrill's attention to it reflects his broader project of recovering Latin and Law French terminology embedded in the primary sources that practitioners and scholars of his era were still consulting.
Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a pointer toward primary sources rather than a full account. The term's meaning is not disputed; what is left undeveloped is the procedural context in which it operated and its relationship to the broader formulaic language of vi et armis pleading.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ARRAY (Jury and Military); UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY; VI ET ARMIS
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