Definition
An archaic legal term with two related but distinct senses:
1. Charged or charging. The act of formally convening a person accused of a crime before a judge; the bringing of a criminal accusation to formal judicial attention.
2. Imputed or attributed to. The laying of fault, folly, or legal responsibility upon a person — as in, no folly may be arretted to one under age, meaning that legal incapacity shields a minor from having wrongful conduct attributed to them.
Both senses share a core meaning: the formal or legal assignment of something — a charge, an accusation, or a fault — to a specific person.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern use. The term has no living entry in contemporary English dictionaries and is not found in ordinary speech.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The term does not appear in Webster's 1913, indicating it had already passed out of common English usage by the late nineteenth century.
Editorial note: ARRETTED is pure legal archaism. Because it carries no modern common meaning at all, there is no gap to bridge — the risk for researchers is not confusion between legal and lay meanings, but rather complete unfamiliarity with the term when encountered in historical sources.
Common Confusion
ARRETTED vs. ARRAIGNED: The first sense of arretted — convening an accused before a judge — closely resembles arraignment in function, and modern researchers may instinctively reach for arraignment when glossing older texts that use arretted. The terms are not interchangeable. Arraignment carries a specific procedural meaning in modern criminal practice (the formal reading of charges and entry of a plea). Arretted, in its historical usage, described a broader or earlier stage: the act of bringing a charged person before judicial authority, without the procedural specificity that arraignment has since acquired. Substituting one for the other when transcribing or analyzing early sources can misrepresent the procedural posture described.
Why It Matters in Research
ARRETTED appears almost exclusively in early English legal texts and is essentially absent from American legal materials except as quoted from older authorities. Researchers will encounter it most often in pre-nineteenth-century treatises, plea rolls, and secondary sources drawing on those materials.
The dual meaning creates an interpretive obligation: context must determine whether arretted signals a criminal charge being brought before a court (the procedural sense) or a legal attribution of fault or responsibility to a person (the imputation sense). The second meaning — imputed to — is the more analytically interesting for legal historians, because it gestures toward early doctrine on capacity and culpability. The canonical formulation in the sources, that no folly may be arretted to one under age, is an early expression of the incapacity principle that would develop into modern infancy doctrine.
Researchers working in corpus sources should note that arretted will not appear in modern secondary literature except in direct quotation or historical analysis. Search strategies that rely on this term alone will retrieve only very old primary sources or scholarly commentary on them. Cross-searching with arraign, impute, charge, and capacity will capture the conceptual territory more completely across different historical periods.
The citation to Staundeforde's Pleas of the Crown (Staundef. P. C. 45) in Black's establishes the procedural sense in sixteenth-century English criminal procedure literature. Cowell's Interpreter is the authority for the imputation sense. Neither is American authority; both are English common law reference works.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary across its first two editions is the primary dictionary support for this term, and the two editions are in close agreement. The first edition definition is slightly compressed and contains what appears to be a conflation or printing artifact — it appends language about an action for cattle or goods wrongfully taken, which seems misplaced and is not repeated in the second edition. The second edition is cleaner and more complete: it provides both the procedural (charged/charging) and the imputation senses, and it preserves the illustrative quotation from Cowell regarding minority as a bar to arrettment of folly.
No other major historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus independently define arretted, making Black's the authoritative — and essentially sole — dictionary source. Researchers should treat the second edition entry as the more reliable text. The Cowell reference is to John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a foundational English legal glossary; the Staundeforde reference is to William Staundeforde's Les Plees del Coron (1557). Both are real historical works. Neither should be treated as binding authority; both establish the historical pedigree and meaning of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
ARRETTED has no jurisdiction-specific meaning in American law. It is a term of English legal history. When encountered in American sources, it appears only as a quotation from or reference to English authorities.