Definition
An archaic Latin legal term drawn from medieval and early modern pleading practice, meaning to accuse, to charge, or to prosecute a person for felony or treason. The term is the Latin form of the verb "to impeach" in its oldest prosecutorial sense — not the modern constitutional sense of removing a public official, but the foundational act of bringing a criminal accusation before a court, particularly in cases involving capital offenses. In Latin-language legal instruments, writs, and records of the common law courts, impeachiare denoted the act of formally lodging a charge of serious crime against a named individual.
Common Confusion
IMPEACHIARE should not be conflated with the modern constitutional IMPEACHMENT process, nor with the evidentiary sense of impeaching a witness. All three share a common etymological root in the idea of accusation or challenge, but they describe legally distinct acts across different procedural contexts. The Latin term impeachiare belongs exclusively to the historical criminal accusation function. Conflating it with constitutional impeachment is among the more common errors in reading back from modern legal vocabulary into medieval and early modern Latin records.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, chancery records, or translated Latin instruments — will encounter impeachiare and its conjugated forms as the operative word for criminal accusation. The critical research trap is anachronism: seeing impeachiare and reading it through the lens of the modern constitutional impeachment process. These are historically connected but functionally distinct. In early usage, the term carries no legislative or political dimension; it is prosecutorial and criminal in nature.
The source material in Rapalje & Lawrence is fragmented in the corpus, and the entry as it survives runs impeachiare together with entries for IMPEDE, IMPEDIATUS, and IMPERTINENCE, reflecting the condition of many nineteenth-century digest compilations. Researchers should treat the Rapalje & Lawrence entry as a minimal waypoint and look to primary Latin records and to Blackstone, Coke, and Glanvill for substantive context on how criminal accusation operated in early common law practice.
The connection to the modern term IMPEACH is direct but requires care. By the time nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries were compiled, "impeach" had bifurcated: one branch retained the sense of discrediting a witness or attacking evidence; the other had become the constitutional procedure for removing civil officers. Neither of those meanings is what impeachiare carries in its original Latin legal usage. When researching historical sources, the Latin form signals the older, purely accusatory function.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the verb "to impeach" as meaning to accuse or prosecute for felony or treason, and the Latin form impeachiare is the inflected legal Latin version of that same root concept. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notably compressed and appears in a section of the dictionary that has suffered from collation issues in the surviving text, with the impeachiare entry bleeding into adjacent entries on impertinence in pleading and impediment. This limits its utility as a standalone definition source.
What Rapalje & Lawrence do not address — and what historical dictionaries in this period generally underserve — is the procedural context in which impeachiare operated: the relationship between private accusation (appeal of felony) and public prosecution, and how the term sat within that distinction. Researchers needing that context must go beyond the dictionary shelf.