Definition
A Latin maxim from old English law meaning "to execute" or "to carry out." The term appears in medieval legal texts as a verb in the infinitive form, signifying the act of putting a legal judgment, command, or sentence into effect. In its historical context, *exequi* described the obligation or authority to enforce what a court or officer had directed — the carrying out of process, sentence, or legal act from its ordered form into physical consequence.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *exequi* will find it almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal texts and their translations or commentaries. Its appearance in Fleta — the late thirteenth-century English legal treatise — situates it firmly in the period of early common law development, when Latin was the working language of English courts and legal writing. A researcher tracing the concept of judicial execution or enforcement through historical sources should understand that *exequi* is a term of art belonging to that Latin-language layer of the common law, not to later English-language doctrine.
The practical research trap is conflation: *exequi* sounds related to *exequatur* (a formal certificate recognizing the authority of a foreign consul or official) and to *executor* (the personal representative of a decedent's estate), but these are distinct terms with separate doctrinal histories. Seeing *exequi* in a medieval citation and assuming it maps onto any of those modern concepts will mislead the inquiry.
Because Burrill's is the primary shelf source carrying this entry, researchers working in pre-modern English legal history who encounter *exequi* in original or transcribed Latin sources will find Fleta the most direct primary authority. Burrill points specifically to Fleta lib. 1, c. 26, § 3 and lib. 2, c. 64, § 19 as the locations in which the term operates — both passages dealing with the duties and functions of legal officers in the context of executing legal process. Any serious engagement with those passages requires working with Fleta directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entirety of the available shelf-source coverage for this term, defining it concisely as "to execute" and anchoring the definition to Fleta. Burrill offers no elaboration beyond the Latin gloss and the citation, which is itself informative: the term did not generate substantial doctrinal commentary in the English legal dictionary tradition, indicating it functioned as a term of the written Latin record rather than as a contested or developed legal concept. No other historical dictionary on the Law Mind shelf carries a separate entry for *exequi*, which suggests that by the time English-language legal lexicography matured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term had receded entirely from active legal use.
What the historical sources collectively miss is any account of how *exequi* relates structurally to the Latin verb family from which English legal concepts of execution descend — a gap that a researcher working on the linguistic history of enforcement doctrine would need to fill through specialized sources outside the standard dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to the historical common law of England and has no current jurisdictional application in any modern common law system. It does not appear in contemporary American, English, or Commonwealth legal usage as an operative term.