Definition
A Latin legal verb from old English law meaning "to conceal." Used in medieval legal texts to describe the act of hiding, suppressing, or withholding something — typically land, rights, or material facts — from proper legal process or from the Crown. The term appears in its conjugated and nominal forms across early English legal literature: concelata (concealed, past participle) and concelamentum (concealment, the noun form denoting the act or condition of concealing).
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of art found almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal sources and their early modern transcriptions. Researchers encountering concelare, concelata, or concelamentum in manuscript or printed sources are almost certainly working with Bracton, Fleta, or materials derived from the Statute of Westminster II (1285). The three forms — verb, participle, noun — appear in close proximity across these sources and should be understood as a family of related terms rather than distinct concepts.
The practical trap: a researcher unfamiliar with Latin legal inflection may encounter concelamentum in a statute or treatise index and fail to connect it to concelare or concelata in the body text. All three forms point to the same underlying legal concept. Cross-referencing across these variant forms is essential when working in Law Mind sources that index Latin terms separately by grammatical form.
The concept embodied by concelare feeds directly into the English common law doctrine of concealment, which developed considerably from these medieval roots into equity jurisprudence and eventually contract law. A researcher tracing the history of concealment as a legal doctrine must pass through this Latin stratum before reaching the fully anglicized treatment in later sources. The medieval usage tends to focus on concealment of land from the Crown or from legal process — a narrower and more specific concern than the broader modern doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary Law Mind source for this term and provides a compact but well-referenced entry. Burrill correctly identifies concelare as old English law Latin and supplies the three principal forms with citations to Bracton (fol. 70b), the Statute of Westminster II (c. 39), and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 48, § 2). This triangulation across Bracton, a parliamentary statute, and Fleta is characteristic of medieval English legal Latin that had achieved some technical stability by the late thirteenth century.
What Burrill does not do — and what no single dictionary entry can — is explain the doctrinal context: concealment in the Bracton and Fleta usage typically concerned the hiding of land from the Crown's escheats or the suppression of facts relevant to tenure and inheritance. The Statute of Westminster II reference places concelamentum in a procedural and property law context. Researchers should not assume these early usages map cleanly onto later equity or contract-law treatments of concealment without independent verification.
No other Law Mind shelf dictionaries include an entry for concelare. For the term's English-language successors, researchers should consult entries on CONCEALMENT in later dictionaries within the corpus.
Jurisdictional Note
Concelare and its derivative forms are specific to the medieval English common law tradition, originating in the Latin legal culture of thirteenth-century England. The term has no direct counterpart in civil law or canon law usage relevant to American legal research, though the underlying concept of concealment appears across all legal traditions under different vocabulary.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Concealment