Definition
A Latin and Law Latin verb used in old English legal practice with two distinct but related senses:
1. To demand — to assert a formal legal claim or make a legal request, corresponding to the Law French demander and its use in pleading contexts.
2. To order, award, or direct — specifically, to command that a judgment or sentence be carried into effect. In this sense, demandare describes the act by which a court commits its adjudication to execution: the tribunal, having rendered judgment, directs that the judgment be enforced. The phrase judicium executioni demandare means to order a judgment to be carried into execution — that is, to enforce a judgment by execution process. The related construction latā sententiā et executione demandatā means "sentence being passed and execution ordered," capturing the two-stage process of pronouncing judgment and then directing its enforcement.
Common Confusion
Demandare should not be conflated with its apparent English cognate "demand" in the colloquial sense of insistence or urgency. In legal Latin, the term carries procedural specificity: it denotes either a formal claim in pleading or, more distinctively, the judicial act of committing a judgment to execution. The second sense — directing enforcement — has no obvious English counterpart and is the one most frequently encountered in Bracton and similar sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early common law materials, particularly Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, will encounter demandare most often in the context of execution of judgment. The verb signals a procedural transition point: the moment at which adjudication becomes enforcement. This is significant for research on the historical relationship between judgment and execution, a distinction that modern procedure largely collapses but which the medieval common law treated as a discrete step requiring its own judicial act.
The dual meaning creates an interpretive trap. In pleading texts such as Townshend's Pleadings, demandare appears in the simpler sense of "to demand" — to make a claim — which aligns with the Law French demander used throughout the Year Books. In Bracton, the same verb shifts to the execution context. Researchers must attend to the source and context before assuming which sense applies.
Because demandare appears primarily in Bracton's fol. 107, 175, 205b, and 303b, corpus researchers encountering the term in Law Mind materials should expect it to arise in discussions of the enforcement stage of civil and criminal proceedings in the early common law period, not in modern procedural materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term. Burrill correctly identifies both senses and provides the key Latin phrases with folio citations to Bracton, which remain the authoritative textual anchors. The entry is compact but accurate in distinguishing the pleading sense (Towns. Pl. 63) from the execution sense (Bract. fol. 107, 175, 205b, 303b). No significant divergence appears across available historical dictionary sources because the term's usage is narrow, period-specific, and confined largely to Latin legal texts. What historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural theory behind the execution sense — namely, why medieval practice required a separate act of demandare to activate a judgment. That question belongs to the history of English civil procedure rather than to lexicography alone.
Jurisdictional Note
Demandare is a term of exclusively historical English law, rooted in the Latin of Bracton and the early common law period. It has no operative significance in modern common law jurisdictions and does not appear in contemporary statute or rule.