Definition
A Latin and Spanish legal term for a written instrument, with meaning varying by legal tradition.
1. Old English Law: A charter or deed; any written instrument memorializing a legal act or grant. The term functioned broadly to encompass formal documents of legal consequence.
2. Spanish Law: A letter, deed, or power of attorney. Las Partidas (pt. 3, tit. 18) uses the term to cover written instruments generally, while elsewhere (pt. 5, tit. 13) the term appears specifically in the context of deeds. White's New Recopilación further identifies carta as the operative term for a power of attorney in Spanish legal tradition.
The term is closely related to, and largely interchangeable with, CHARTA, its Latin parent form. Anderson's Dictionary of Law treats CARTA as a direct redirect to CHARTA, reflecting that the two terms functioned as equivalents across the legal literature.
Common Confusion
CARTA and CHARTA are routinely used interchangeably in historical legal sources, and the distinction is more orthographic than substantive. Researchers should search both spellings when working in medieval English, ecclesiastical, or Spanish colonial legal materials. Neither term should be confused with CHARTER, the anglicized descendant, which carries a narrower and more specialized meaning in modern usage — typically referring to a document constituting an organization or granting defined rights, rather than any written instrument broadly.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily encountered in three research contexts, each requiring different source navigation:
First, in Old English and medieval legal materials, carta appears as a generic term for written instruments. When reading early English legal records, court rolls, or treatises in the Law Mind corpus, researchers will encounter carta used broadly — not limited to what modern lawyers would call a charter. Treating every instance of carta as a formal constitutional-style charter will produce misreadings.
Second, in Spanish colonial law materials, carta appears with more specific meaning depending on context. Las Partidas — the foundational Spanish legal code — uses carta across multiple parts and titles with different operative meanings. Burrill's careful triangulation of the term across different titles of Las Partidas and White's New Recopilación is the most precise of the historical dictionaries on this point, and researchers working in Spanish colonial or Southwest American legal history should anchor there rather than the shorter Black's and Bouvier's entries.
Third, researchers using keyword searches in the Law Mind corpus should be aware that carta will surface across documents of very different character: a medieval English land grant, a Spanish colonial deed, and a power of attorney may all use the same term. Jurisdictional and temporal context is essential to interpreting which meaning applies.
The term also connects to a broader family of related instruments — CARTA BIANCA, CARTA DE FORESTA, and similar compounds — where the base term qualifies a specific instrument type. Researchers finding carta in a compound form should look up the full phrase rather than relying on the meaning of carta alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five historical dictionaries are in near-complete agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's give identical treatments: old English law (charter or deed, any written instrument) and Spanish law (letter, deed, power of attorney), with the same citation to Las Partidas. Anderson redirects to CHARTA without independent elaboration, confirming that the terms were treated as equivalents.
Burrill's is the most informative entry, distinguishing the Spanish uses by specific citations to different parts and titles of Las Partidas and adding the White's New Recopilación reference for the power of attorney usage. For researchers needing precision in the Spanish law context, Burrill's entry is the starting point.
No historical dictionary addresses the term's appearance in ecclesiastical or church legal records, where carta also appears as a general instrument term. That gap is worth flagging for researchers working with canon law materials in the corpus.
Jurisdictional Note
The term carries legal weight primarily in two historical jurisdictions: medieval English common law (where it gave rise to CHARTA and eventually CHARTER) and Spanish civil law (where it operated across the Las Partidas framework). In American legal history, the Spanish law meaning is most relevant to research touching on Louisiana, Texas, California, and other former Spanish colonial territories, where Spanish-language legal instruments remained operative into the nineteenth century.