Definition
A Latin term from old English legal practice meaning default — specifically, the failure of a party to appear or respond as required in a legal proceeding. The term is the Latin-language equivalent of the English "default" as used in medieval common law procedure, appearing in Bracton and other early English legal texts to describe situations where proceedings could advance against an absent or non-responding party.
Common Confusion
DEFALTA should not be confused with the broader modern concept of default judgment, which encompasses both the procedural failure and the remedy flowing from it. DEFALTA, as used in its historical context, refers primarily to the act or fact of non-appearance itself — the default as a procedural event — rather than the consequent judgment or order. Researchers encountering the term in Bracton or similar sources should read it as a procedural status, not a disposition.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in transcriptions of medieval English legal texts, Bracton in particular, and in secondary scholarship glossing those sources. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on early common law procedure, the development of the assize system, or the history of default as a procedural mechanism should treat DEFALTA as a marker pointing toward pre-modern procedural doctrine rather than anything with a living operational definition.
The key navigational point: when Burrill cites Bracton's phrase "capiatur assisa per defaltam," it reflects a distinct medieval procedural rule — that an assize (a form of jury proceeding) could be taken in a party's absence. This is a specific procedural consequence tied to the development of the English common law courts and the assizes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it has no direct modern analog. The phrase "compensari debeat defalta cum defalta" — default ought to be set off against default — suggests an early procedural reciprocity principle that is similarly historical and should not be read forward into modern default doctrine without care.
Researchers should also note that the term appears in inflected Latin forms (defaltam, defallis) depending on grammatical case, so corpus searches should account for variant endings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this entry, and its treatment is sparse but precise: DEFALTA is defined simply as "default" within old English practice, with the definition carried almost entirely by the Bracton citations. Burrill does not attempt a substantive analysis of the doctrine but instead lets the Latin passages from Bracton do the explanatory work. This is characteristic of Burrill's handling of obsolete Latin and Law Latin terms, which tend to receive identification and citation rather than doctrinal elaboration.
The Bracton references are to Book 5, Tractate 3 (De Defallis — specifically "on defaults"), folios 364b and 330. These are real sections of Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, the thirteenth-century treatise attributed to Henry of Bracton, which contains detailed treatment of default in the context of assize procedure. Researchers needing fuller doctrinal context should look to that source directly rather than relying on Burrill's compressed entry.
No other historical dictionary in the standard reference shelf (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's) is cited in the source material, and given the term's highly archaic character, it is unlikely to appear with greater elaboration in those works. The term had effectively ceased to function as live legal vocabulary long before most of those dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
DEFALTA is a term of medieval English common law with no jurisdiction-specific modern usage. It does not appear in American, Scottish, or other common law systems as an operative term.