Definition
A Law Latin verb meaning to impeach, accuse, or prosecute a person for felony or treason. The term appears in medieval and early modern English legal writing as the Latin-derived equivalent of what later became the English "impeach" in its original criminal prosecution sense — that is, the formal charging or bringing of a person before a tribunal to answer for a serious crime against the crown or state.
IMPECHIARE is not a classical Latin word but a Latinized form derived from Old French, representing the scribal practice of rendering vernacular legal terms into Law Latin for use in formal records, writs, and pleadings.
Common Confusion
Modern readers encounter two obstacles with this term. First, the word "impeach" today carries an almost exclusively constitutional meaning — the legislative removal process for public officers. IMPECHIARE predates and does not reflect that constitutional sense. Its meaning is closer to the general criminal prosecution sense of impeach, which was the dominant meaning in English law through the medieval and early modern periods. Second, the term should not be confused with IMPEDICARE or similar-looking Law Latin terms relating to obstruction or impediment. The shared Latin prefix can mislead.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — particularly Year Books, plea rolls, and medieval treatises — will encounter IMPECHIARE in contexts that bear no resemblance to modern impeachment proceedings. The term signals a criminal accusation or prosecution, often in the context of felony or treason charges brought in royal courts.
The critical navigational point: when IMPECHIARE appears in a source, the surrounding context almost certainly concerns criminal procedure, not legislative or political removal. Researchers who approach the term with only a modern understanding of "impeach" will misread the passage.
This term also marks a useful textual indicator of period and register. Its appearance in a document signals Law Latin drafting conventions associated with English common law records before the shift toward English-language pleading. Documents using IMPECHIARE are likely pre-Elizabethan or early modern at the latest.
The Burrill entry for this term appears damaged or incomplete in the available source text, which is itself a research caution: Burrill's Law Dictionary, despite its comprehensiveness, has transcription and reproduction issues in some editions that affect legibility of less common Latin terms. Where Burrill's entry is fragmentary, Black's and Bouvier's entries should be treated as the more reliable reference points for this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four historical dictionaries converge on the same core definition: to impeach, accuse, or prosecute for felony or treason. This is a rare case of near-complete uniformity across the shelf sources, which reflects that IMPECHIARE is a narrow technical term with a fixed meaning in the sources where it appears — there is little room for interpretive drift.
Bouvier's cites Cowell's Interpreter, the early seventeenth-century legal dictionary by John Cowell, as authority. This is a useful provenance marker: Cowell's work was a primary repository for Law Latin and Law French terms then circulating in English legal practice, and his inclusion of IMPECHIARE confirms the term's genuine use in legal records rather than being a later lexicographer's invention.
Black's first and second editions reproduce identical language, suggesting the second edition drew directly on the first without independent research for this entry — a common pattern for minor Latin terms across Black's editions.
None of the historical dictionaries engage with the term's relationship to the broader semantic history of "impeach," nor do they distinguish IMPECHIARE from the later constitutional sense of the English word. That silence is expected given the dictionaries' reference purposes but is worth noting for researchers who need the fuller historical picture.
Jurisdictional Note
IMPECHIARE is a historical Law Latin term specific to the English common law tradition. It has no operative meaning in modern U.S., English, or Commonwealth legal practice and appears today only in historical legal scholarship and archival research.