Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning to gain or win a suit; to prevail by pleading. Specifically, to overcome an opposing party through the process of pleading — to obtain a favorable outcome in litigation. The term combines the sense of victory in a legal contest with the mechanism by which that victory was achieved: argument and pleading before a tribunal.
Why It Matters in Research
EXPLACITARE is a term of limited practical recurrence but real interpretive significance when it appears. Researchers encountering it in medieval English legal records, chronicles, or early treatises should understand it as a term describing litigation outcome, not merely the act of pleading. The distinction matters: the word does not simply mean "to plead" but carries the completed sense of having prevailed through pleading.
The term appears in chronicle sources as well as legal records. Burrill's citation to William of Malmesbury's *De Gestis Regum Angliae* signals that EXPLACITARE surfaces in narrative historical writing, not only in strictly legal instruments. Researchers working in Anglo-Norman and early medieval English legal history should therefore cast a wider net than court rolls alone when searching for this term and its cognates.
The root *placitare* — to plead, or more broadly to engage in legal proceedings — underlies a family of related terms common in medieval Latin legal usage, including PLACITUM (a plea, suit, or court) and IMPLACITARE (to implead, or to bring into court). Understanding this family helps researchers recognize EXPLACITARE on sight and avoid misreading it as a general term for pleading activity when it specifically denotes success in that activity.
Because EXPLACITARE does not appear in common law treatises of the post-medieval period and drops from legal vocabulary as English displaced Latin in the courts, it will not be found in standard modern legal dictionaries or in post-medieval case reports. Its presence in a source is itself a dating signal, pointing toward records from the era of Latin pleading in English courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term, and its entry is brief but carefully constructed. Burrill supplies two Latin glosses: *litem obtinere* (to obtain a suit, i.e., to win it) and *placitando evincere* (to overcome by pleading), which together clarify that the term captures both the result and the method. Burrill attributes the term to Spelman — Henry Spelman's *Glossarium Archaeologicum*, the essential reference for medieval Latin legal terminology in the English tradition — and corroborates it with the citation to William of Malmesbury. This dual sourcing, legal glossary plus chronicle, is characteristic of Spelman's method and of terms that existed in both learned legal usage and educated narrative writing.
No other standard historical law dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — carries an entry for EXPLACITARE, reflecting the term's deep archaism even by the time those dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should treat Burrill-via-Spelman as the authoritative chain for this term and recognize that the absence from later dictionaries reflects obsolescence, not absence from the historical record.
Jurisdictional Note
EXPLACITARE is specific to the English legal tradition and its Latin-language records. It has no known application in continental civil law usage and is not a term of Scots, Irish, or colonial American law.