Definition
To ship; to load or place goods aboard a vessel for transport. Eskippare is a Latin term drawn from medieval English legal usage, appearing in old English procedural records and entry books in the context of shipping and maritime commerce. It functions as a verb describing the act of consigning or transferring cargo onto a ship, and appears most often in pleading forms and registers of legal entries relating to trade and the movement of goods by sea.
Why It Matters in Research
Eskippare belongs to the dense vocabulary of Law Latin that fills medieval English pleading records, entry books, and maritime documents. Researchers working in early English commercial law, shipping disputes, or port records may encounter the term in pleading forms without any accompanying gloss. Its significance is primarily navigational: recognizing the term prevents misreading of a pleading or entry that turns on the act of shipment itself — whether goods were in fact placed aboard, when that placement occurred, or who bore responsibility for it.
The term surfaces in Rastell's Entries, one of the principal early collections of English pleading forms, and in Townshend's Placita — both sources that Law Mind researchers working on pre-modern commercial and admiralty practice will encounter. Because the term does not survive into modern legal vocabulary, it presents an identification problem rather than an interpretive one: the challenge is recognizing what it means, not debating its scope.
Researchers should note that eskippare sits within a broader cluster of Law Latin shipping and trade terms — terms for lading, freight, and carriage — that appear throughout medieval and early modern English pleading records. Identifying eskippare correctly anchors the surrounding context as a shipping transaction and directs research toward the appropriate body of commercial and maritime law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry for this term, defining it concisely as "to ship" and situating it in old English law. Burrill cites Townshend's Placita (p. 223) and Rastell's Entries (p. 409) as the supporting sources — both pleading-form collections, which confirms that the term's natural habitat is the formulaic language of procedural documents rather than substantive legal treatise writing.
No elaboration of the term's scope, no discussion of related shipping vocabulary, and no note of any disputed usage appears in the historical record as reflected by Burrill. The entry is spare by design: eskippare was a working term of the pleading books, not a doctrinal concept requiring extended treatment. Historical dictionaries beyond Burrill do not appear to have addressed the term independently, making Burrill the primary and essentially exclusive lexicographic authority.