Definition
To rate, assess, or let at a fixed rent or sum. In medieval English law, *arrentare* denotes two related but distinct acts: (1) the official rating or assessing of a charge or payment, as in the assessment of amercements or other dues; and (2) the granting of land or property in exchange for a fixed annual rent — that is, to let at a stated rent. The term appears primarily in Latin legal instruments, statutes, and records of the medieval and early modern periods and is not in active use in modern legal practice.
Common Confusion
*Arrentare* and *arrent* are closely linked: *arrentare* is the Latin verbal form from which the anglicized *arrent* derives. Researchers encountering either form in historical records should treat them as expressing the same legal concept. Neither should be confused with the modern English *rent* as a standalone noun or verb, which carries consumer and landlord-tenant law connotations wholly absent from the medieval usage. See ARRENT.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English land records, plea rolls, or enrolled statutes — particularly those touching on manorial grants, forest law, or the assarting of waste land — will encounter *arrentare* as a term of art describing the conversion of occupied or cultivated land into rent-paying tenure. The Statute of Marlborough (52 Hen. III, c. 11), cited by Burrill, is a concrete anchor for the assessment sense of the term; researchers should locate that statutory context when interpreting *arrentare* in documents of that era.
Two research traps are worth noting. First, the term straddles assessment and leasing concepts, and context in the source document must determine which sense is operative. A record in a forest eyre may use *arrentare* to mean the formal renting out of assarted land to an occupant; a manorial account may use it in the narrower sense of rating a payment. Second, because the term appears in Latin legal records, researchers relying on calendared or translated versions of plea rolls and close rolls may find it rendered inconsistently — sometimes as "arrent," sometimes as "let at rent," sometimes simply as "assess." Checking against the original Latin where possible will prevent misreading the nature of the transaction.
The term has no meaningful life in equity or common law after the sixteenth century. Its appearance in later legal dictionaries is antiquarian rather than practical, and researchers should not expect to find it in post-Tudor case law or statutes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this entry. His treatment is compact but reliable, tracing the Latin form to the Law French *arenter* (from *a* and *rente*) and correctly identifying the dual senses of rating/assessing and letting at rent. He anchors the term to the Statute of Marlborough, which is the most significant statutory reference point available for this usage.
What Burrill does not provide is context for the land-grant and forest-law applications of *arrentare*, where the term had considerable practical importance in records of the royal forests and manorial administration. That gap reflects the limits of dictionary treatment for a term whose full significance emerges only from documentary and archival sources rather than common law reporting. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary do not appear to carry independent entries for *arrentare*, treating it — if at all — as a variant of *arrent*.
Jurisdictional Note
*Arrentare* is a term of English medieval law with no parallel development in American legal usage. Researchers in Scots law or continental civil law traditions will find cognate concepts in Roman and feudal land tenure but not this specific Latin term of art.