Definition
In old English law, *communitas* (plural: *communitates*) denotes a community, company, or society — most often a collective body of inhabitants sharing a common legal identity, such as a town, borough, or guild. The term appears principally in medieval and early modern English legal records as a designation for an organized body of persons recognized, however informally, as a collective unit capable of acting in common matters. It does not necessarily imply formal incorporation; a *communitas* could exist and act in law before the full apparatus of corporate status was recognized.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An unstructured community of common experience; the spirit of community, intense social equality, solidarity, and togetherness.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; the English derivative *community* is defined as a body of people having common rights and privileges, or common interests, civil, political, or ecclesiastical.
The gap here is directional. Modern popular usage of *communitas* (drawn largely from anthropologist Victor Turner's influential work) emphasizes the dissolution of structure — an egalitarian, liminal togetherness standing in contrast to formal hierarchy. The old English legal meaning runs precisely the opposite way: *communitas* in legal sources denotes a body recognized as having some degree of collective standing, however informal. Importing the modern anthropological sense into a reading of medieval pleading records would be a significant interpretive error.
Common Confusion
*Communitas* is occasionally conflated with *universitas* in historical sources, but the terms are not interchangeable. *Universitas* more precisely denotes an aggregate or corporation recognized as a legal person — a body with rights of succession, capacity to hold property, and standing to act in law. *Communitas* is broader and less technically demanding; it can describe an organized community without implying those full juridical attributes. The distinction matters when assessing what legal capacities a historical source is attributing to a collective body.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *communitas* in historical records should resist assimilating it to the modern concept of a municipal corporation. The term predates the clear legal distinction between incorporated and unincorporated bodies, and its appearance in a document does not indicate that the community in question possessed formal corporate rights, held land in perpetuity, or could sue and be sued. It is a descriptor of social and quasi-legal organization, not a term of art with fixed consequences.
The term appears heavily in Year Book entries, borough records, and early Chancery proceedings. When Burrill cites *Townshend's Pleas*, he is pointing to a period — roughly the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries — when the vocabulary of English public law was still borrowing directly from continental Latin usage without the stabilizing influence of later statutory drafting. A *communitas* in a 1310 plea roll is not the same creature as a municipal borough in 1835.
Corpus researchers should also watch for *communitas* functioning as a near-synonym for *universitas* (a body, aggregate, or corporation) in some sources, and for its distinction from *villa* (a vill or township as a taxable unit) in others. These overlaps and distinctions are rarely flagged in the historical dictionaries, which tend to give the bare translation without navigational guidance.
Finally, researchers working on common lands, common rights, or early borough history will find *communitas* appearing in proximity to terms like *commonalty*, *commons*, and *commune*. The Latin term can anchor a cluster of related concepts that, in English translation, scatter across different entries in later dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is characteristically spare: a Latin gloss, a classification ("In old English law"), and a single citation. The entry confirms that the term denotes a community, company, or society, and the citation to *Townshend's Pleas* situates it in the pleading literature of the early common law period. Burrill does not attempt to distinguish *communitas* from related terms (*universitas*, *societas*, *villa*), nor does he address whether the term carries any implication of legal capacity.
No other shelf source in the present corpus provides a dedicated entry for *communitas*. Researchers needing to trace the term's usage across continental canon law and civil law traditions — where *communitas* carried more developed technical meaning, particularly in the context of community property and municipal governance — will need to look outside the common law dictionary tradition entirely, to sources such as the glossators and post-glossators on Roman and medieval public law.