Definition
A Latin term from medieval European legal usage meaning to beat or strike a person. The term carried a specific physical connotation: beating with a club or stick (fustigare), as distinguished from more general verbs for striking or wounding. It appears in early Germanic legal codes governing the physical abuse of persons, including enslaved individuals and servants, and was the root from which the common law concept of battery developed.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No direct English entry. The term is Latin and does not survive in modern English except through its descendants.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word. The anglicized form "batter" appears in Webster's 1913 as meaning to beat repeatedly, to pound, or to wear by beating — as in battering a door or battering metal.
The gap between the ordinary sense of "batter" (to pound or repeatedly strike a thing) and the legal term battere is one of specificity and origin. Battere in legal Latin designated a legally cognizable act of physical violence against a person, embedded in formal penalty structures. It was not a casual verb of percussion but a term of legal pleading and legislative drafting in early medieval codes.
Common Confusion
Battere should not be confused with the modern legal term BATTERY, though battery derives from it. Battery in contemporary common law is a complete cause of action or criminal offense with defined elements. Battere, by contrast, is a medieval Latin legislative and documentary term — a descriptor of conduct in early Germanic codes, not a freestanding legal concept. Researchers encountering battere in historical sources should resist reading back into it the doctrinal architecture that battery later acquired.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early medieval legal sources — particularly the Leges Langobardorum (Lombard Laws), Carolingian capitularies, and the Lex Alamannorum — will encounter battere as a term of art describing actionable physical violence. Its appearance in these sources is significant because the codes in which it appears are among the earliest written Germanic laws to assign specific penalties for interpersonal violence, including violence against enslaved persons.
The term is a bridge point in the genealogy of battery as a legal concept. Tracing that lineage requires moving from battere in continental Germanic law through its adoption into Latin legal writing, then into Norman and Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary, and finally into the English common law forms. Researchers who begin their inquiry at BATTERY in English common law sources will miss this earlier stratum entirely.
When Burrill references Capitulary 1, chapter 81 and the Lombard Laws (Lib. 1, Tit. 8, l. 30), he is pointing to primary sources that are not easily accessible in English translation. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is Burrill's secondary intermediary for several of these citations and is itself a seventeenth-century source that may introduce its own interpretive layers. Researchers should treat Burrill's references as signposts to primary sources rather than as authoritative readings of them.
The phrase linum battere — to beat flax — appearing in the same capitulary context as the violent usage illustrates how battere operated in a broader semantic field before legal specialization narrowed it. This dual use (beating flax; beating persons) reflects the physical, club-and-stick meaning at the root of the term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill correctly identifies the Saxon root (batte, a club), situates the term in old European rather than English common law, and provides primary source references to the Lombard Laws and the Lex Alamannorum via Spelman.
What Burrill does not do — and what no single historical dictionary entry can do — is trace the doctrinal evolution from battere as a descriptive term in penal codes to battery as a common law tort and crime. That evolution runs through centuries of legal development and is not visible from this entry alone. Burrill's treatment is most useful as a lexical anchor: it confirms the term's meaning, its geographic and temporal scope (old European law, specifically Germanic), and its etymological grounding. Researchers should not expect it to do more.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Battery (Tort); Germanic Legal Codes; Medieval Latin Legal Terminology