Definition
A Latin term appearing in old legal records meaning to arraign — that is, to bring an accused person before a court to answer a criminal charge. The term is essentially a Latin form of the procedural act now rendered in modern law as arraignment. It appears in medieval and early modern legal instruments and records as a verb form; the past participial form arrenatus signifies a person who has been arraigned or formally accused.
Common Confusion
ARRENARE should not be confused with ARRAIGN as a living legal concept. Arraignment remains an active term in modern criminal procedure; arrenare does not. A researcher who encounters arrenare in a historical source and searches for it in modern procedural materials will find nothing — the correct modern research path runs through arraignment. Similarly, arrenare is distinct from the separate Latin procedural terms used in medieval records for indictment (such as indictamentum) or accusation generally (accusare, impetere). Arrenare refers specifically to the court appearance and formal answering of a charge, not to its initiation.
Why It Matters in Research
ARRENARE is a purely archival term. Researchers will encounter it only in transcriptions of medieval Latin court rolls, plea rolls, or related records — not in modern legal materials. Its significance is navigational: when indexing or searching historical English criminal records, failure to recognize arrenare as a cognate of arraign may cause a researcher to misread or overlook procedural entries describing the formal charge and plea stage of a criminal prosecution.
The relationship between arrenare and arraign is important for dating sources. Latin record-keeping in English courts was formally abolished by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731, which required court records to be kept in English. After that date, the Latinized form largely disappears from official records. A researcher encountering arrenare in a document should treat it as strong evidence that the source predates or is contemporaneous with that transition.
Researchers working with Cowell's Interpreter — the authority Burrill cites — should be aware that Cowell's definitions, while foundational, reflect early seventeenth-century usage and carry limitations in their coverage of procedural detail. Cowell's entry should be read alongside Coke and later commentators to understand what the arraignment process actually entailed in the period when arrenare appears in sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and his entry is brief: he identifies arrenare as a Latin verb from old records meaning to arraign, notes the adjectival form arrenatus (arraigned, accused), and refers the reader to Cowell and to the entry for ARRAIGN. No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — appear to give arrenare a separate entry, treating it instead as a record-Latin variant absorbed under the arraignment heading.
The brevity of coverage across the historical dictionary shelf reflects the term's status as archival Latin rather than operative legal vocabulary. It was never a term of art in the sense of carrying contested doctrinal meaning; it was simply the Latin rendering of a procedural act. Researchers should therefore weight Burrill's entry as a pointer rather than a substantive definition and pursue the underlying procedural history under ARRAIGN and ARRAIGNMENT.
Jurisdictional Note
As a record-Latin term, arrenare is primarily encountered in English legal sources. Researchers working in Scottish or Irish historical records should be alert to variant Latin spellings in those traditions, as legal Latin was not always uniform across jurisdictions.