Definition
To embezzle; to misappropriate funds or property entrusted to one's care. A Latin term from old English law denoting the act of fraudulent conversion or theft by a person in a position of trust or administrative responsibility. The term appears primarily in ecclesiastical and admiralty court contexts, describing the conduct of clerks or officials who diverted funds under their control.
Common Confusion
BARRATARE and BARRATRY share an obvious etymological relationship and occasional proximity in old admiralty sources, but they describe different wrongs. BARRATARE denotes embezzlement or misappropriation — a property offense by a court officer or administrator. BARRATRY, in admiralty law, denotes fraud or willful misconduct by a ship's master or crew against the vessel's owners. The two concepts can overlap in practice (a fraudulent master might technically barratare ship's funds), but they are not interchangeable, and the legal consequences and analytical frameworks differ. See BARRATRY for the full treatment of that term.
Why It Matters in Research
BARRATARE is a term of very narrow historical currency. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources, particularly in admiralty and ecclesiastical court practice materials. Its appearance in Clerke's Praxis Curiae Admiralitatis signals a specific context: the conduct of court officers, proctors, or clerks administering funds or property within admiralty jurisdiction.
The critical research trap here is conflation with BARRATRY, a related but distinct concept. Barratry in admiralty law refers to a master or mariner's fraud against shipowners; barratry in common law refers to the habitual stirring of quarrels and litigation. BARRATARE maps most closely to simple embezzlement or misappropriation, not to either of those established barratry meanings. A researcher reading an old admiralty document accusing an officer of barratare should not assume the broader barratry framework applies.
Because the term is extinct in modern practice, it will not appear in contemporary legal databases. Researchers working in digitized early modern legal materials — particularly admiralty court records, ecclesiastical court registries, and practitioners' manuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — are the most likely audience.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and his entry is brief: "To embezzle. Clerke's Prax. Cur. Adm. tit. 39." The sole citation is to Clerke's Praxis Curiae Admiralitatis, a practitioner's manual for the English admiralty court. This narrow sourcing reflects the term's limited circulation — it was a term of art within a specific institutional context rather than a word with broad common law currency.
No broader definitional elaboration appears in Burrill, and the term does not receive independent treatment in Black's or Bouvier's dictionaries, which suggests it had already fallen from active use by the time those works were compiled. Researchers should treat Burrill's single-sentence entry as effectively the outer boundary of what historical dictionary authority can provide here.