Definition
A Latin adjective of medieval legal Latin meaning "of or relating to war," "warlike," "at war," or "hostile." The term appears in early English legal instruments and chronicles to characterize conditions, persons, or periods associated with armed conflict or a state of war. Its most significant legal application appears in the phrase tempus guerrinum — "time of war" — which carried practical legal consequences in medieval English law, particularly regarding the rights of alien merchants, the suspension of certain legal protections, and the administration of royal charters.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal texts, royal charters, and the works of early English legal writers. Researchers working in primary sources from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries should be alert to several points.
First, the spelling is unstable. Burrill notes that the charters of King John (c. 41) and the ninth-year reissue of Magna Carta (9 Hen. III, c. 30) use the variant spelling guerrina rather than guerrinus in parallel passages. The foundational Magna Carta text of 1 Hen. III, c. 34 uses guerrinus. A researcher searching for this term in digitized charter databases or manuscript transcriptions must account for both forms, as well as the related noun guerra (war) and its variant guera, which appear across the same corpus.
Second, the phrase tempus guerrinum as it appears in Fleta (lib. 5, c. 14, § 4) is a term of legal art, not merely a descriptive phrase. In medieval English law, the designation of a time as tempus guerrinum had operative consequences — it could affect the legal standing of foreign merchants, the enforceability of contracts, and the availability of certain legal remedies. Researchers encountering this phrase should treat it as a trigger for inquiry into the specific legal regime applicable during declared or recognized periods of war.
Third, because this term belongs entirely to the medieval Latin layer of English legal vocabulary, it has no significant common law survival into modern legal usage. It will not appear in modern statutes, case law, or treatises. Its research utility is confined to historical legal scholarship, charter and chronicle analysis, and the study of the medieval law of war and alien status.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary English-language lexicographic treatment of this term. Burrill correctly derives guerrinus from the medieval Latin guerra (war), which itself reflects a Romance-language borrowing into the Latin of post-Conquest English legal writing — a linguistic marker of the Norman administrative tradition that reshaped English legal Latin after 1066.
Burrill's entry is compact but precise. It anchors the term to Spelman's Glossarium (voc. Guerra), the standard reference for medieval Latin legal vocabulary in the English tradition, and identifies three distinct documentary sources: the Magna Carta of 1 Hen. III, the charters of King John, and Fleta. This triangulation across charter and treatise sources is useful because it confirms that guerrinus was not an isolated scribal coinage but a recognized term of art appearing across the mainstream documentary record of medieval English law.
The variant guerrina noted by Burrill deserves attention. The shift between masculine adjectival endings and variant forms in these charter texts reflects the scribal inconsistency common to medieval Latin legal writing, where standardization of spelling was not a governing concern. Researchers should not treat spelling variation as evidence of different terms or meanings — the functional legal meaning is consistent across forms.
No other source dictionaries in the current Law Mind corpus cover this term. Spelman's Glossarium, cited by Burrill, remains the deepest available reference for this vocabulary layer but is itself a specialized scholarly instrument rather than a practitioner's resource.
Jurisdictional Note
Guerrinus is a term of medieval English legal Latin and has no recognized modern jurisdictional application. Its relevance is confined to English legal history prior to the consolidation of common law doctrine in the later medieval period.