Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "to make." FABRICARE carried two distinct legal senses depending on context:
1. Lawful coining. The authorized minting or manufacture of coin. In this sense, fabricare denoted a legitimate act of production under royal or sovereign authority.
2. Unlawful making or counterfeiting. The forging or counterfeiting of coin or documents. In pleadings and records, the term appeared in phrases such as fabricavit et contrafecit ("he forged and counterfeited") and falsum factum fabricavit ("he forged a false deed"), signaling criminal conduct. In this sense the term is functionally equivalent to "to forge."
Because the same root word served both meanings, context — particularly the surrounding pleading language — was essential to determining whether lawful manufacture or criminal forgery was alleged.
Common Confusion
FABRICARE sits at the intersection of two meanings that are legal opposites: authorized production and criminal forgery. A researcher encountering the term in an old record without attending to the surrounding formula risks misreading a counterfeiting charge as a recitation of lawful minting, or vice versa. The presence of companion terms — particularly contrafecit or falsum factum — is the key diagnostic. When fabricare appears alone in an exchequer memorandum or mint record, it almost certainly refers to lawful coining. When paired with contrafecit or falsum, it signals criminal forgery.
Why It Matters in Research
FABRICARE is a term of old English pleading and record-keeping; it does not survive as operative legal vocabulary in modern practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in:
— Medieval and early modern English court records, exchequer memoranda, and indictments for coining offenses or forgery.
— Translated or abstracted Year Book materials and early common law reports.
— Pleading precedents reproduced in historical treatises.
The dual meaning is the primary research trap. The same Latin verb served both the royal mint's administrative records and the criminal indictment for counterfeiting. Neither Black's first edition nor the second edition flags this ambiguity explicitly — they treat the two senses as parallel without warning the reader that context is dispositive. Burrill is the most useful of the shelf sources precisely because it supplies the actual pleading formulas (fabricavit et contrafecit; falsum factum fabricavit) that differentiate the criminal usage, and because it identifies the exchequer memorandum source for the lawful coining sense.
Rapalje & Lawrence add a significant navigational note absent from the Black's editions: the entry for the related English verb FABRICATE carries the parenthetical "(implies criminal intent)," citing Wilberforce on Statute Law. This signals that by the time English-language legal usage was consolidating in the nineteenth century, the fabricate/fabricare family had shed the neutral manufacturing sense and was drifting toward an exclusively criminal or deceptive connotation — a semantic narrowing relevant to researchers tracing the history of forgery doctrine.
Corpus researchers working on coinage law, mint administration, or forgery and counterfeiting should check whether a given instance of fabricare appears in an administrative or a prosecutorial document before drawing conclusions about meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core dual meaning. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence offer nearly identical entries, each citing 1 Salk. 342 as authority. Burrill's is the outlier in the best sense: it provides the actual Latin pleading formulas drawn from 2 Ld. Raym. 1462, 1 Salk. 342, and 5 Co. 62, and it separately identifies the exchequer memorandum (Mem. in Scacc. H. 12 Edw. I) for the lawful coining usage. This makes Burrill's the preferred starting point for a researcher who needs to work with the term in primary sources rather than simply identify its general meaning.
What none of the historical dictionaries address is the procedural significance of the pleading formulas themselves — specifically, whether fabricavit et contrafecit was a term of art with fixed legal consequences in coining indictments, or merely a descriptive redundancy. That question requires consulting the Year Books and early coining statutes directly.
Jurisdictional Note
FABRICARE is a term of old English law with no direct American common law analog. It does not appear as operative pleading language in American courts. Researchers working in American colonial records may encounter it in contexts derived from English precedent, but it carries no independent American legal history.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forgery; Counterfeiting; Coinage Offenses.