Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "guilty." Culpabilis appeared in medieval legal pleading and procedure as a formal declaration of guilt or a finding of culpability. Its most common recorded use is in the phrase culpabilis de intrusione — guilty of intrusion — denoting a finding against a party who had wrongfully entered upon lands to which another held right.
The term's negation, non culpabilis (abbreviated non cul.), carried independent procedural significance as the formal plea of "not guilty" in criminal proceedings, functioning as the defendant's denial of the charge on the record.
Common Confusion
Culpabilis should not be confused with culpable in its modern English sense, which carries connotations ranging from moral blameworthiness to negligence. In the Latin pleading tradition, culpabilis was a binary term of legal status — guilty or not guilty — rather than a graduated assessment of fault. The modern legal usage of culpable (as in culpable negligence or culpable homicide) introduces degrees of blameworthiness that the medieval Latin term did not itself express.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Year Books, or early treatises will encounter culpabilis as a term of pleading art, not a term of substantive criminal law analysis. Two navigational points matter:
First, the phrase non culpabilis is the historically significant half of this entry for common law procedural research. It is the ancestor of the modern "not guilty" plea. Sources abbreviating it as non cul. or n.c. may be encountered in early criminal procedure materials without further explanation. Researchers tracing the history of the general issue plea in criminal proceedings should flag every instance of non culpabilis as a data point in that lineage.
Second, culpabilis de intrusione — the phrase preserved in Fleta — connects this term to the law of intrusion, a specific possessory wrong in medieval land law distinct from disseisin. Researchers conflating intrusion with disseisin will misread the procedural context in which culpabilis appears. The Fleta citation (lib. 4, c. 30, § 11) is a real reference point and one of the few anchors for this term in the primary sources; it should be consulted directly when the term appears in a land law context.
Third, Burrill's entry appends a note on culpable homicide — a separate modern concept — immediately following the definition of culpabilis. This is a typographical artifact of Burrill's organization, not an indication that culpabilis itself encompasses degrees of homicide. Researchers reading Burrill in sequence should treat the culpable homicide passage as a distinct entry that happens to follow.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st ed.) and Black's (2nd ed.) are in substantial agreement, both limiting culpabilis to its old English law meaning of "guilty" and anchoring the term to the Fleta reference for culpabilis de intrusione. The second edition adds the non culpabilis / non cul. gloss, which the first edition omits — a useful expansion for procedural researchers.
Burrill's entry matches both Black's editions on the core definition but introduces two complications: it quotes Lord Moncrieff's description of culpable homicide (from Arkley's Reports) in the same block, which risks associating culpabilis with a modern graduated-fault concept the Latin term does not support. Burrill's arrangement reflects the editorial convention of grouping related terms alphabetically in sequence rather than integrating them into a single definition, but the proximity is misleading.
No historical dictionary entry attempts to trace the relationship between culpabilis as a pleading term and the substantive development of culpability doctrine in English or Scots law. That gap is significant: researchers looking for the doctrinal bridge between the formal plea and the modern fault concept will not find it in any of the shelf sources and must look to legal history scholarship and early treatise literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Culpabilis is a term of medieval English law and Latin pleading. Its formal use was confined to that tradition. Culpable homicide as a distinct statutory category survives in Scots law and some Commonwealth jurisdictions, but that development is terminologically and doctrinally separate from culpabilis as defined here.