Definition
De receptamento is a Latin phrase from medieval criminal law meaning "of receipt" or "of harboring." It describes the offense — or the legal proceedings concerning the offense — of receiving or sheltering a known criminal, typically a felon or outlaw. The term appears in early English common law as a designation for the act of harboring a wrongdoer after commission of a felony, making the harbourer a participant in the criminal scheme by providing refuge or concealment.
In substance, de receptamento corresponds to what modern law calls accessory after the fact or, in some contexts, harboring a fugitive. The medieval actor who committed receptamentum — the underlying noun form — was understood to obstruct justice by shielding the principal offender from capture and punishment.
Common Confusion
De receptamento is frequently encountered alongside related Latin terms from the same period — maintenement (maintenance of a wrongdoer), abettamentum (abetting), and procurementum (procurement) — all of which described distinct modes of secondary criminal liability. Researchers should not conflate these terms. De receptamento specifically concerns post-offense sheltering or receipt, not pre-offense encouragement or assistance during the crime itself. The distinction mattered in Bracton's treatment of criminal participants and carries forward into the modern division between accessories before the fact and accessories after the fact.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources predating the seventeenth century. Researchers encountering de receptamento in historical legal documents — plea rolls, indictments, Bracton manuscripts, or treatises citing Bracton — should understand it as a technical charge designation, not a general descriptive phrase. It signals a proceeding against a harbourer, not against the principal felon.
Burrill directs readers to receptamentum, the substantive noun, which is the more commonly indexed form in historical dictionaries. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should search both forms: de receptamento when scanning procedural or charging language in medieval records, and receptamentum when seeking doctrinal or treatise discussions of the underlying offense.
The practical research trap here is anachronism in the other direction: modern secondary liability doctrine (accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, harboring) developed from this root but diverged substantially in elements, procedure, and punishment. Do not read modern requirements back into medieval sources using this term, and do not assume medieval doctrine maps neatly onto modern statutory offenses.
Because de receptamento appears in Bracton — one of the foundational treatises of English common law — it surfaces in historical scholarship on the development of complicity doctrine. Researchers tracing the intellectual history of accessory liability will find this term at the origin point of that lineage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal: "Of receipt; of harbouring. Bract. fol. 152 b. A term of old criminal law." The citation to Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, folio 152b, is the authoritative anchor. Bracton's treatment of criminal participants organized secondary liability into categories — those who commanded, counseled, assisted, or received — and de receptamento designated the last of these. Burrill adds no further doctrinal content and redirects to receptamentum for substance.
No other source dictionary in the available corpus provides an entry for this term. The narrow coverage reflects the term's vintage: by the time later English legal dictionaries were compiled, the Latin phrase had been absorbed into common law doctrine under English-language terminology, and the specific locution de receptamento had receded to purely historical usage.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the procedural dimension: in medieval practice, the charge de receptamento could be brought independently of a conviction of the principal, a feature that distinguished early common law accessory doctrine from later rules requiring the principal's prior conviction.
Jurisdictional Note
De receptamento is a term of English medieval common law and has no living jurisdictional application. It does not appear as operative legal terminology in any modern common law jurisdiction. Its relevance is confined to historical and comparative legal research.