Definition
In old English law, communare means to common — that is, to exercise or enjoy the right of common over land. The term describes the act of a person entitled to common rights actually putting those rights to use, typically by pasturing animals or gathering resources on another's land pursuant to a legally recognized entitlement.
Why It Matters in Research
Communare is a term of art from medieval and early modern English land law, appearing almost exclusively in Latin-language legal records, writs, and pleadings from the period when Latin dominated English legal documentation. Researchers working in manorial records, court rolls, or early common law pleadings may encounter it in contexts describing the exercise — not merely the holding — of common rights. The distinction matters: communare refers to the act of commoning, while the underlying entitlement itself would be denominated by terms such as common of pasture or right of common.
Because the term fell out of active use as English displaced Latin in legal proceedings (a process largely completed by the eighteenth century), it will not appear in modern case law or statutes. Its presence in a document is itself a useful dating signal: Latin legal terminology of this type is characteristic of records predating or contemporaneous with the transition period, roughly pre-1733.
Researchers should be careful not to conflate a reference to communare with references to the broader concept of common land or commons as a geographical or political matter. The term is procedural and transactional in emphasis — the doing of commoning — rather than a descriptor of the land itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, defining communare as "to common; to enjoy the right of common," citing Cowell's Interpreter (voc. Communance) as authority. Cowell's Interpreter, a significant early seventeenth-century legal glossary, is the primary historical source for this and many similar Law Latin terms. Burrill does not elaborate on the mechanics of the right or its procedural context, which is characteristic of his treatment of archaic Latin terms: he preserves the form and its bare meaning without extensive doctrinal discussion.
No other major English legal dictionaries in common use — including Jacob's Law Dictionary or Tomlin's Law Dictionary — add materially to this entry. The term is sufficiently specialized and archaic that it receives minimal treatment across the historical dictionary shelf. Researchers requiring fuller context should look beyond dictionaries to primary sources on common rights, including manorial records and the older literature on copyhold and rights of common.
Jurisdictional Note
Communare is specific to the English common law tradition and will appear only in records derived from that system. It has no independent American legal history; the term would not appear in post-colonial American legal sources except in historical or scholarly discussion of English land law antecedents.