Definition
A Latin verb of medieval legal usage carrying three related but distinct senses, each surviving in English legal terminology through its derivatives:
1. To entrust or put in charge. In this sense, committere denoted the formal act of placing property, persons, or responsibilities into the care or oversight of a designated officer or individual — as when a court directed that land be committed to the custody of appointed men pending resolution of a legal matter.
2. To commit or be guilty of an act. Used in pleading and procedural Latin to describe the perpetration of an offense — as in the maxim that a juror commits perjury when certain conditions are met.
3. To send to prison or into custody. The foundation of the English legal terms commitment, committal, and mittimus. In this sense, committere described the act by which a court or magistrate ordered a person conveyed to a place of detention.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering committere in medieval English legal records, ecclesiastical proceedings, or Latin formularies must determine from context which of the three senses governs. The same word appearing in a land proceeding (sense 1), a criminal charge (sense 2), or a detention order (sense 3) carries entirely different legal weight and connects to different bodies of doctrine.
The term appears most frequently in Law Mind corpus sources dealing with Magna Carta commentary, Fleta, and early common law procedure. Burrill cross-references committere directly to committitus, the past-participial form that anchors entries on commitment and prison custody — a signal that the detention sense was, by the time English legal dictionaries were systematized, the dominant surviving meaning in practice.
Researchers working with Magna Carta texts should note the land-custody sense specifically: the provision directing that land be committed to two lawful and discreet men (duobus legalibus et discretis hominibus) reflects a procedural safeguard for the estates of those under legal disability, a context with no obvious modern counterpart but with significance for historical property and guardianship research.
The perjury usage drawn from Fleta represents committere in its criminal-act sense and connects to the broader Latin formulaic tradition in which the verb served as the standard way to attribute an offense to an actor — a pattern that carried directly into English indictment pleading through phrases such as "did commit" or "committed the felony of."
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source in the Law Mind corpus treating committere as a headword. Burrill presents all three senses in compact sequence without ranking their importance, but the structural choice to end the entry with a cross-reference to committitus suggests that, for practical legal dictionary purposes, the detention and custody senses were considered the term's most consequential legacy in English law.
The two quotations Burrill preserves are genuinely instructive: the Magna Carta passage (chapter 4 of the Charter of King John) grounds the entrustment sense in constitutional history, while the Fleta passage (lib. 5, c. 22, § 9) grounds the criminal-act sense in the procedural Latin of the thirteenth-century legal treatise tradition. Together they illustrate how a single Latin verb could carry administrative, criminal, and custodial meaning simultaneously in medieval legal usage.
Historical dictionaries generally treat committere as a gateway term rather than a self-contained concept, directing readers promptly to its English derivatives. Researchers who stop at those derivatives without tracing back to committere may miss the land-custody sense, which does not map cleanly onto any single modern English term.
Jurisdictional Note
Committere is a Latin term of the pre-modern English common law and ecclesiastical legal tradition. It carries no jurisdiction-specific modern application but underlies doctrinal vocabulary — commitment, committal, mittimus — that varies in usage between English and American courts and between criminal and civil contexts.