Definition
One who arraigns — that is, the officer or party responsible for bringing an accused person to the bar, formally stating the charge, and calling upon the accused to answer. In historical English practice, the arraigner was the procedural actor who initiated the arraignment itself: presenting the indictment or appeal, identifying the accused, and demanding a plea. The term describes a role, not a fixed office; in practice the function was discharged by the court clerk, the king's serjeant, or another officer of the court.
The term is now largely obsolete as a distinct noun. Modern criminal procedure retains the act of arraignment but does not separately name the individual who performs it.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who arraigns.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who arraigns. (Coleridge.)
Common and legal meaning are here essentially parallel — both define the term by reference to the act of arraigning — but the legal meaning carries procedural weight the common definition does not convey. In legal usage, the arraigner operated within a specific formal sequence: the indictment had to be sufficient, the accused had to be present at the bar, and the charge had to be put in a prescribed manner. The common definition captures none of that procedural architecture.
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Why It Matters in Research
ARRAIGNER appears in Law Mind sources almost exclusively in historical and procedural contexts rooted in early English common law. Researchers encountering the term in Year Book materials, abridgments, or treatises on criminal procedure should understand that it refers to the functionary executing the arraignment process, not to a prosecutor or accuser in the modern sense.
The Burrill entry draws on Year Book references from 2 Edward III (ca. 1328), making this term a marker of pre-modern English criminal procedure. When the source text discusses whether an indictment is "sufficient to arraign" the accused, it is addressing a threshold question about the adequacy of the charging instrument — a doctrinal concern that persists into modern law under different vocabulary (sufficiency of the indictment, notice requirements).
Researchers should also note the Law French context. ARRAIGNER in Law French sources is the verb form; ARRAIGNER as an English agent noun derives from it. Conflating the two in transcription or indexing is a known trap in older materials.
The procedural role described by ARRAIGNER maps onto the modern court clerk's function at arraignment, but the historical office carried different weight in a system where the arraignment itself had more substantial legal consequences — including, in some periods, the accused's ability to challenge the indictment before being required to plead.
For military law researchers: the arraignment function in courts-martial has a parallel structure and similarly assigns the role to a court officer rather than a named "arraigner," but the underlying procedural logic is comparable.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this term, and its entry is instructive precisely because it grounds the definition in Year Book citation rather than abstract description. The two quoted passages from 2 Edward III — one addressing indictment sufficiency, one addressing the requirement that arraignment proceed by indictment or appeal and in due manner — show that even at this early date, the arraigner's function was constrained by procedural regularity. The accused could not simply be "put to the bar"; the mechanism had to be lawful.
Burrill does not complete the sentence beginning "It is the office of arraignment to inform the accused of —" in the available excerpt, but the evident completion is that the arraigner's duty was to inform the accused of the charge — a notice function that anticipates modern due process requirements.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term independently. Researchers relying solely on Webster's 1913 or Wiktionary will find the definition accurate but bare.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Arraignment and Entry of Plea (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Courts-Martial Procedure — Investigation (Article 32), Arraignment, Trial, and Sentencing (The Law Mind Military, Veterans & Admiralty Law Encyclopedia)
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