Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning to impanel — that is, to formally enroll or select persons onto a jury panel. The term is the Latin rendering of the procedural act by which a jury was constituted for trial. It does not carry independent substantive meaning beyond its role as the formal written expression of what is now called impanelment or empanelment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering IMPANULARE will find it exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, ecclesiastical records, and antiquarian compilations. It will not appear in modern procedural contexts. The term is primarily a paleographic and transcription issue: a researcher working through manuscript court rolls, plea rolls, or parish antiquities may encounter the word and need to recognize it as a routine procedural notation rather than a term of substantive legal significance.
The chief research trap is orthographic variation. Latin legal records show inconsistent spelling across scribal traditions — forms such as impanellare, impannellare, or simply panellare appear in overlapping contexts. Searching a single spelling in a corpus of historical records will produce incomplete results.
The citation in Burrill to Parochial Antiquities points researchers toward ecclesiastical and parish court records as a locus for this term, suggesting it was not confined to common law courts alone. Cowell's Interpreter, also cited, was a standard reference for legal Latin and law French terms in English practice and remains a useful comparative source for any researcher tracing Latin procedural vocabulary in English records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the standard historical dictionaries. The entry is minimal: it identifies IMPANULARE as Latin, marks it as appearing in old records, defines it as meaning to impanel, and cites Parochial Antiquities and Cowell's Interpreter. No further elaboration is offered, which is consistent with the term's status as a straightforward procedural notation rather than a term requiring doctrinal explanation.
Cowell's Interpreter (1607) treated similar Latin procedural vocabulary systematically and would be the natural companion source for any researcher seeking period-contemporary definition and usage. Burrill does not diverge from Cowell; he relies on him. No significant disagreement or evolution is visible in the available historical dictionary record, which reflects the term's narrow and stable function as a Latin equivalent of a single procedural act.
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not address is the full range of orthographic variation in manuscript sources, the specific court contexts in which the term appears, or the procedural details of impanelment practice that would give the term richer documentary context. For those questions, researchers should move from the dictionary to the primary records and to procedural histories of English jury selection.