Definition
A Latin term from civil and old English law meaning to defeat or destroy an adversary's pleading. In its procedural sense, to elide a pleading was to overcome or nullify it — rendering it void or without effect in the course of litigation. The term carried a secondary, more general meaning of destruction or annihilation in the broader legal texts of the period.
Common Confusion
ELIDERE should not be confused with the modern English grammatical term "elide" (to omit or merge sounds or syllables), though both descend from the same Latin root. In legal contexts, elidere is exclusively a term of pleading and procedure, not a term of language or rhetoric.
Why It Matters in Research
ELIDERE is a term you will encounter almost exclusively in medieval and early common law sources, particularly in Bracton and Fleta — the foundational treatises of English legal science. Researchers working with those texts should understand that the term functions as a technical verb describing a specific procedural outcome: the defeat of a pleading by the opposing party's counter-pleading or by operation of law.
The term does not appear in modern practice or procedure. Its relevance is therefore confined to researchers tracing the history of pleading doctrine, studying the Roman law roots of English civil procedure, or interpreting passages in Bracton, Fleta, or similar authorities. When a medieval source says a plea was "elided," it means the plea was legally crushed — not merely answered, but rendered null. This distinction matters when reconstructing the procedural history of a case or understanding the medieval pleading sequence.
Researchers should also note that the term's literal meaning — to crush or strangle — reflects the vivid, physical metaphor common in scholastic legal Latin, where procedural outcomes were often described in bodily or violent terms. Understanding this rhetorical register helps avoid misreading passages in Bracton and Fleta as describing something more dramatic or extra-procedural than a routine pleading defeat.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source for this term in the English-language legal dictionary tradition, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill identifies two uses: the narrower procedural meaning (to defeat an adversary's pleading, citing Bracton, fol. 399b) and the broader destructive meaning (to destroy, citing Fleta, lib. 2, c. 60, § 3). He also supplies the literal Latin gloss — "to crush or strangle" — which grounds both uses in the same root sense of forcible annihilation.
What Burrill does not provide is any developed doctrine around the term. There is no elaboration of when a pleading could be elided, by what mechanism, or with what consequences — details that would have to be recovered from Bracton and Fleta directly. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a finding aid pointing toward the primary sources, not as a doctrinal account.
No other standard English legal dictionary in common use — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin's — provides a comparable entry for elidere, which underscores how thoroughly the term receded from legal usage after the medieval period. Its survival in Burrill reflects that dictionary's unusually deep engagement with Roman and early English law vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
ELIDERE is not a term of modern positive law in any common law jurisdiction. Its relevance is historical and scholastic, arising from the civilian and early English legal tradition reflected in Bracton and Fleta. It has no operative meaning in contemporary American, English, or Commonwealth practice.