Definition
A common barretor is a person who habitually and repeatedly stirs up groundless lawsuits, quarrels, or disputes — whether through litigation or otherwise — without legitimate justification. The offense is distinguished from a single act of stirring up strife by its persistent, habitual character: the "common" qualifier signals a pattern of conduct rather than an isolated incident.
At common law, being a common barretor was a criminal misdemeanor. The theory was that repeated instigation of baseless legal conflict imposed a social harm on the community, burdened courts, and disturbed the peace. The barretor did not need to be a party to the suits provoked — the offense lay in the incitement itself.
Common Confusion
COMMON BARRETOR / BARRETOR / MAINTENANCE / CHAMPERTY
These four terms are closely related but occupy distinct positions in the common law scheme against abuse of litigation.
A barretor is the broader category; a common barretor is the habitual version. Maintenance refers to the unauthorized support of another person's lawsuit (financial or otherwise) without lawful justification. Champerty is a species of maintenance in which the supporter receives a share of the proceeds if the litigation succeeds. A common barretor need not finance or share in litigation — the offense is stirring up the quarrel in the first place. Researchers working in historical sources will encounter all four terms in proximity; they are related disorders but each has its own elements and consequences.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely historical. Common barretry was abolished or fell into effective desuetude across most American jurisdictions and in England by the twentieth century, though it survived in some states' criminal codes well into the mid-twentieth century as a technical offense rarely prosecuted. Researchers should be alert to several traps:
First, the word "common" functions as a term of art throughout medieval and early modern English law — it frequently signals habitual or public character rather than anything relating to shared property or the common law generally. Do not conflate the "common" in common barretor with unrelated uses of the word.
Second, historical sources treat common barretry as part of a constellation of offenses — barretry, maintenance, champerty, and sometimes embracery — that together composed the common law's regime against corruption and abuse of legal process. A researcher tracing any one of these terms will need to read the others. These concepts appear together in treatises, indictments, and judicial opinions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
Third, the Burrill entry's archaic note that the common barretor "is not in a certain place, but sometimes here, at other times at London, changing at the will of the king" reflects an older procedural concept tied to the Court of Common Pleas and the itinerant nature of royal justice. Researchers encountering this passage should not attempt to apply it as substantive doctrine; it is a jurisdictional curiosity from early English court organization, not a definition of the offense.
Fourth, because common barretry overlaps conceptually with the modern tort of malicious prosecution and with professional responsibility rules against frivolous litigation, researchers exploring those modern doctrines may find historical barretry sources useful as intellectual background, even though the criminal offense itself has no direct modern analog.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's definitions are substantively identical in their core formulation: one who frequently excites and stirs up suits and quarrels, at law or otherwise. Black's adds the gloss "groundless," which Burrill omits — a meaningful distinction, since Burrill's formulation could theoretically reach even meritorious litigation stirred up by a habitual meddler, while Black's emphasis on groundlessness ties the offense more firmly to abuse of legal process.
Burrill's entry is the richer of the two for historical research. The cross-references to Barretor and Barretry signal that Burrill treats common barretor as a subspecies of a broader definitional family, and the archaic quotation he preserves connects the term to early English court organization in a way Black's does not. Both sources, however, treat the term as a finished historical artifact with no discussion of modern survival or jurisdictional variation — an absence that itself signals the term's obsolescence by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Neither dictionary addresses abolition or the legislative fate of common barretry, which is the genuinely important practical question for a researcher trying to determine whether the offense has any operative legal significance in a given jurisdiction.
Jurisdictional Note
Most American states and England abolished common barretry as a criminal offense during the twentieth century. A handful of states retained technical statutory versions longer. Researchers should verify local abolition dates before assuming the offense has no current procedural significance in any given jurisdiction.