Definition
A Latin term from medieval English law meaning "to common" — that is, to exercise a right of common, the entitlement to use another's land for specific purposes such as pasture, fishing, or gathering wood. The term appears in the legal Latin of Bracton and Fleta and belongs to the vocabulary of the common of pasture and related usufructuary rights over land.
Derived forms found in the historical sources include:
1. COMMUNICANTES — Those who common; commoners in the technical sense of persons entitled to exercise rights of common over land. Distinct from the political or social sense of commoner.
2. JUS COMMUNICANDI — The right of commoning; the legal entitlement to use another's land in the limited ways recognized under the law of common. This formulation appears in Fleta and represents the right in its most abstract, doctrinal expression.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal texts, most prominently Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and Fleta. Researchers working in those sources will need to recognize communicare and its derivatives as technical vocabulary for rights of common, not as references to communication in any modern sense.
The principal trap is false cognate confusion: communicare looks and sounds like words meaning "to communicate" or "to share information," but its legal meaning in this context is strictly about land use rights — the exercise of common rights over soil, pasture, or resource. A researcher encountering the term in a medieval conveyancing document, plea roll, or treatise must read it against the surrounding land law context, not its surface Latin meaning.
Burrill's citations anchor the term to specific folio references in Bracton (fol. 229b) and Fleta (lib. 4, c. 19, § 4), which are the primary loci for this vocabulary. Researchers tracing the doctrinal development of rights of common in English law should consult those passages directly. The term has no meaningful survival in modern legal usage; it belongs entirely to the historical register.
Because communicare is procedural and definitional scaffolding within larger treatments of common rights, it rarely appears as a term of art in its own right in post-medieval sources. It surfaces instead as part of longer Latin phrases or as an explanatory gloss. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a pointer to the primary sources rather than as a self-contained doctrinal statement.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary modern-era dictionary source for this term. His entry is concise and accurate, tying communicare directly to Bracton and the derived forms communicantes and jus communicandi to Fleta. The entry does not elaborate the substantive doctrine of common rights, functioning instead as a terminological cross-reference for readers working through the Latin texts.
Burrill's approach is consistent with how the law dictionaries of his era handled medieval Latin terms: define briefly, cite the classical authority, and move on. What the entry does not provide — and what a researcher will need to supplement elsewhere — is any account of how communicare fits within the broader system of rights of common (common of pasture, common of piscary, common of turbary, common in gross, common appendant, and so on). For that doctrinal architecture, Bracton and Fleta themselves, along with Coke's Institutes and later treatises on real property, are the necessary companions.
No significant divergence or disagreement exists among historical dictionaries on this term because it is rarely treated at length outside of Burrill. Its meaning in context is stable and narrow.
Jurisdictional Note
Communicare and its derivatives are terms of English medieval law and have no recognized counterpart in American legal usage. Researchers in U.S. legal history will encounter the concept only when tracing the English common law antecedents of easements and profit à prendre, where rights of common were partially absorbed or transformed.