Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "arrayed for battle" or "equipped for trial by combat." The term describes the formal state of readiness of a party who has been prepared and presented for trial by battle — the medieval judicial procedure in which a disputed matter, typically an accusation of felony or a claim of right, was settled by armed combat between the parties or their champions. To be *correie de batel* was to be dressed, armed, and formally presented before the court in the posture required for the wager of battle to proceed.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in Year Book materials and early plea roll records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Researchers working in those sources should understand that the phrase signals a procedural moment — the point at which the combat machinery of the court has been formally engaged and the parties have been presented in fighting array. It is not a substantive legal concept carrying forward into later common law; it is a status marker within the specific ritual of trial by battle.
The Year Book citation in Burrill (Mich. Term, 4 Edw. III, f. 12) places this term squarely in the early reign of Edward III, a period when trial by battle, though declining in practice, remained formally available in appeals of felony and certain real property disputes. Researchers should be alert to the fact that wager of battle terminology is highly formulaic in Year Book sources — phrases like this one are embedded in highly stylized procedural recitations, and their meaning is procedural rather than substantive.
Because trial by battle was abolished in England by statute in 1819 (59 Geo. III, c. 46), the term has no operative legal meaning after that date. It will not appear in modern legal materials. Any researcher encountering it outside Year Book or early common law plea roll contexts should treat the usage as either antiquarian citation or error.
The term also illustrates a broader challenge in researching Law French sources: terms that appear to describe physical or martial states are often technical terms of art embedded in procedural choreography, not descriptive language. Translating them literally risks missing their procedural function.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment identified in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's entry is brief — a translation and a single Year Book citation — which accurately reflects the term's narrow scope. The entry does not attempt to embed the phrase in a broader analysis of trial by battle procedure, and researchers should not expect historical dictionaries generally to carry this kind of contextual scaffolding for highly specialized Law French procedural phrases.
What historical dictionaries collectively tend to underserve for terms of this type is the procedural sequence in which the phrase operated: the formal presentment before the court, the role of the marshal or constable in supervising the array, and the specific rules governing what constituted proper battle-readiness. For that context, researchers must move from the dictionary shelf to primary Year Book scholarship and to treatises on the law of arms.
Jurisdictional Note
Trial by battle was a feature of English common law and was received in some form in early American colonial practice, though its actual use in the colonies was exceedingly rare and contested. The term *correie de batel* is effectively confined to English legal sources. It has no meaningful American jurisdictional history.