Definition
In old legal records and practice, *imp* (also rendered *impe* or *empe*) is an archaic verb meaning to impeach or accuse. Found primarily in early common law and ecclesiastical court records, it denoted the act of formally charging a person with an offense or lodging an accusation before a tribunal. The term appears in pleading and record contexts and is not a standalone procedural mechanism but rather a shorthand notation in manuscript records reflecting the Latin and Norman French vocabulary of medieval English law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym for "god" in the context of multi-user dungeon (MUD) gaming; informally, a small or mischievous creature.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A young or inferior devil; a puny demon; a contemptible evil worker. Also, archaically, a shoot, scion, bud, or graft; an offspring or child.
The gap here is wide and historically layered. The common English word *imp* carried no accusatory or procedural meaning at any point in its ordinary usage — its legal sense derived from entirely different linguistic roots and was already obsolete or archaic by the time Webster's 1913 recorded the word. A researcher encountering *imp* in an old legal record should not import any sense of "devil," "child," or "graft" into that context. The legal and common meanings are false cognates across time.
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Common Confusion
*Imp* in legal records is easily conflated with *impeach* or *impute*, both of which share similar Latin roots and appear in overlapping contexts. The distinction matters: while *imp* (as Cowell records it) denotes the act of accusation in older records generally, *impeach* developed into a term of art with specific constitutional and parliamentary dimensions. Researchers should not treat a notation of *imp* in a medieval or early modern record as equivalent to the modern constitutional process of impeachment. The words share ancestry but diverged sharply in scope and formality.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-eighteenth-century English legal records — particularly plea rolls, ecclesiastical court records, and early common law manuscripts — will encounter *imp* (or variant spellings such as *impe*, *ympe*, or the Latin-inflected forms) as an abbreviated notation. Its meaning in context is accusatory or charging, not descriptive of the accused's status.
Several navigational cautions apply:
First, the term's archaic status means it vanishes from legal usage well before the period covered by most modern legal dictionaries. It will not appear in Bouvier, Black's, or other standard American references. Burrill preserves it, citing Cowell, which traces it to "old records" — meaning researchers must reach back to Cowell's *Interpreter* or similar early glossaries for corroboration.
Second, because *imp* is a verb form in these records, it may be conjugated or abbreviated differently across manuscripts. Paleographic care is required; the term can be confused with other abbreviated Latin or Law French verbs beginning with *imp-*.
Third, the term has no procedural life of its own. It does not name a writ, a cause of action, or a recognized pleading form. It is a notation, not a term of art, and should be treated accordingly when reconstructing what a historical record actually records.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary, citing Cowell, defines *imp* (in old records) as meaning "to impeach or accuse." This is the sole primary entry in the historical law dictionary corpus for the term in its legal sense. Burrill provides no elaboration beyond the citation to Cowell, suggesting the term was already understood as a fossil — preserved for the sake of completeness in old-record research rather than active legal usage by Burrill's time.
Cowell's *Interpreter* (1607, various editions) is the foundational source. Cowell was among the first English legal lexicographers to systematically catalog Law French and archaic common law vocabulary, and his treatment of *imp* is representative of his broader project: preserving the working vocabulary of medieval pleaders for readers who could no longer assume familiarity with it.
No other historical legal dictionary in the standard corpus — not Bouvier, not Black's, not Tomlin — appears to carry the term in its accusatory sense. This absence is itself informative: the word was obsolete as active legal vocabulary by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled, and it survived only in the antiquarian English tradition represented by Cowell and, derivatively, Burrill.
Webster's 1913 does not record the accusatory legal meaning at all, confirming that by the nineteenth century the word's common and legal meanings had fully diverged and the legal meaning had effectively disappeared from active circulation.
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Jurisdictional Note
The accusatory sense of *imp* is specific to English common law records and their ecclesiastical law cognates. It does not appear in American legal sources in any active sense. Researchers working with colonial American records that draw directly on English pleading conventions may encounter it, but it should be treated as an inherited English form rather than an Americanism.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pleading (historical forms and record notation); Impeachment (origins and etymology); Old English and Law French Legal Vocabulary.
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