Definition
BARRETRY (also spelled BARRATRY in admiralty and insurance contexts): The offense of habitually stirring up quarrels, suits, or groundless litigation. A common barretor is a person who repeatedly incites or maintains lawsuits and quarrels either at law or otherwise, for personal gain or out of malicious motive, to the disturbance of the public peace and the vexation of others. At common law, barretry was a criminal misdemeanor.
BARRETTOR (also BARRATOR): The person who commits barretry. One who habitually stirs up suits, quarrels, or contentions among others.
Note on spelling: The terms appear in legal literature under both "barretry/barrettor" and "barratry/barrator." In most American and English criminal law sources, "barretry" refers to the offense of stirring up litigation. "Barratry" in admiralty and marine insurance law is a distinct though etymologically related term referring to wrongful acts of a ship's master or crew against the vessel's owner. These two spellings have historically been used with varying consistency across sources, and researchers should treat the variant spellings as functionally interchangeable within their respective legal domains.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Barratry" in ordinary usage is almost exclusively encountered in legal contexts, carrying over the technical legal meaning without independent popular development.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defines barratry (in the legal sense) as "the offense of frequently exciting and stirring up suits and quarrels between his majesty's subjects, either at law or otherwise," and separately treats the admiralty usage as the "fraudulent breach of duty on the part of a master of a vessel."
The gap between common and legal meaning is minimal here because the term never entered general popular usage. The more significant trap for researchers is the internal legal gap: the same word, spelled slightly differently or not at all, carries two distinct legal meanings depending on whether the context is criminal common law (stirring up litigation) or maritime law (officer misconduct against shipowners).
---
Common Confusion
BARRETRY vs. BARRATRY (ADMIRALTY): These are functionally two different legal concepts that share an etymology and are often spelled identically in older sources. Barretry in criminal law targets the stirring up of groundless suits and quarrels among private persons. Barratry in maritime and insurance law targets fraud or gross misconduct by a ship's master or crew acting against the interests of the vessel's owners or insurers. A researcher encountering "barratry" in a 19th-century digest must determine from context whether the source addresses criminal common law or admiralty before drawing any analytical conclusions.
BARRETRY vs. CHAMPERTY vs. MAINTENANCE: These three offenses were historically grouped together as related common law crimes and torts involving the improper financing or incitement of litigation. They are distinct: maintenance is the intermeddling in another's lawsuit without lawful cause; champerty is maintaining another's suit in exchange for a share of the proceeds; barretry is the habitual repetition of such conduct, making it a pattern offense rather than a single act. Older sources sometimes treat them as a cluster without clearly demarcating their boundaries.
---
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Common law barretry was not formally subdivided, but commentators recognized distinctions in practice:
- COMMON BARRETRY: The standard form — habitual stirring up of suits or quarrels among others.
- PRIVY BARRETRY: Stirring up litigation involving a specific party, often the barretor himself as a party to the suits he incites.
The distinction appears in some English treatises but was not consistently maintained across American jurisdictions.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Barretry as a criminal offense is largely obsolete in modern American and English law. Most jurisdictions have either abolished it by statute or allowed it to fall into disuse. Researchers will encounter the term almost exclusively in historical sources — treatises, digests, and case reporters from the 18th and 19th centuries — and must be alert to several navigational issues.
First, the spelling problem is real and consequential. Digitized corpus searches for "barretry" will miss sources that use "barratry" to mean the same thing, and vice versa. Run searches under both spellings and their variant forms (barrator, barretor, barrater) when working in historical materials.
Second, the grouping with champerty and maintenance in older indexes and digests means that relevant materials on barretry may be shelved analytically under maintenance or filed in chapters treating all three offenses together. Abbot's Digest, American Digest System entries, and 19th-century encyclopedias frequently handle these as a unit.
Third, the modern relevance of barretry concepts has not entirely disappeared — its policy concerns (discouraging frivolous and vexatious litigation) survive in modern doctrines including vexatious litigant statutes, Rule 11 sanctions, and abuse of process tort. A researcher tracing the historical foundations of anti-litigation-abuse doctrine should treat barretry as an ancestor term and follow the conceptual lineage forward.
Fourth, in jurisdictions that retain criminal statutes derived from common law, barretry may still technically exist on the books even if rarely prosecuted. State-level research should include a statutory check before concluding the offense is entirely abolished.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define barretry as "the offense of frequently exciting and stirring up suits and quarrels between the king's subjects, either at law or otherwise," and identify the barrettor as one who is "guilty of barretry." Their treatment is compact and follows the standard common law formulation closely, drawing from Blackstone's Commentaries and the established criminal law tradition without significant elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries handle well: the core definition is stable and consistent across sources from Blackstone through the late 19th-century American dictionaries. There is no meaningful doctrinal disagreement about what barretry means in criminal law.
What they handle poorly or omit: the historical sources do not adequately flag the admiralty/criminal spelling divergence that causes persistent confusion in research. They also do not trace the decline of the offense or its absorption into related modern doctrines — a gap that leaves the researcher without guidance on where the concept went after it fell out of active prosecution.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary (various editions) provides somewhat more expansive treatment, noting the relationship to champerty and maintenance and the requirement of habitual conduct (not merely a single act) as an essential distinguishing element. Researchers who find Rapalje & Lawrence insufficient on this term should consult Bouvier's for supplementary historical context.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Barretry was a common law misdemeanor in both England and the United States, but its statutory status varies considerably by state. Some American jurisdictions codified it; others abolished it expressly; many simply ceased prosecuting it without formal abolition. English law formally abolished the offense by the Criminal Law Act 1967. American researchers should not assume abolition without a state-specific check.
---