Definition
Arraiatores (Latin: plural) is a medieval English legal term referring to arrayers, or commissioners of array — officers appointed by royal authority to organize, inspect, and equip local military levies. Their specific charge was to ensure that soldiers were properly armed and outfitted according to their rank and kind. The office was rooted in the system by which the English crown raised armed forces from the counties, requiring local men to present themselves in serviceable military readiness.
The term is purely historical and has no living legal meaning. It belongs to the administrative and military law of medieval England, closely tied to the statutory framework governing the array of troops, particularly as codified during the reign of Richard II.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering arraiatores in historical sources are working within a narrow band of medieval English military administration — primarily the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. The term will appear in statutes, writs, and administrative records rather than common law cases.
The critical navigational point: arraiatores connects to two distinct but overlapping bodies of historical law. First, the military array system, through which the crown exercised a prerogative power to muster armed men from the counties. Second, the administrative law of royal commissions, since arraiatores were commission-holders acting under royal letters patent or statutory authority. A researcher focused on prerogative powers, military tenure, or the constitutional limits of royal authority over local militias will find arraiatores at the intersection of all three.
Burrill's entry points to Stat. 12 Ric. II c. 6 as the statutory anchor. Researchers should be aware that the powers and duties of commissioners of array were contested across the medieval period, and references to arraiatores in records predating or postdating that statute may reflect different scopes of authority.
The passing note in Burrill's entry about the etymology of arraign — connecting it to ad rationem ponere — is an editorial digression and has no substantive connection to the legal function of arraiatores. Do not let that footnote redirect research into criminal procedure. The two terms share a Latin root but describe entirely unrelated legal institutions.
Secondary sources such as Cowell's Interpreter and Blount's Law Dictionary, both cited by Burrill, are the natural next step in historical dictionary research for this term. Neither is comprehensive on the constitutional dimensions of the array system; for that, Hale's Historia Placitorum Coronae and Blackstone's Commentaries (Book I) provide more useful context, though their focus is the criminal arraignment, not military array.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source available for this term. His entry is brief and functional: it identifies arraiatores as officers responsible for soldiers' armor and accoutrements, cites the Richard II statute, and routes the reader to Cowell and Blount. The entry does its job without elaboration.
What Burrill does not address — and what no single historical legal dictionary fully resolves — is the broader constitutional tension that commissioners of array represented. The array system was periodically challenged by Parliament as an encroachment on local liberties and an irregular form of military conscription. By the time Burrill compiled his dictionary in the nineteenth century, the office had long since become a dead letter, and the entry treats it as pure antiquarianism.
The digression about the etymology of arraign that appears at the close of Burrill's entry reflects a common organizational habit in historical legal dictionaries: clustering terms with similar spellings regardless of substantive relationship. Researchers should treat it as an artifact of dictionary arrangement, not a signal of conceptual connection.
Jurisdictional Note
Arraiatores is specific to English law and has no recognized equivalent in Scots law, Irish law, or any colonial American jurisdiction. American researchers encountering the term will find it only in historical treatises drawing on English medieval sources.