Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning to impeach or accuse. Its past participial form, impescatus, means impeached. The term is effectively a Latinized rendering of the Old French empescher (to impede, hinder, or accuse) and appears in medieval and early modern legal manuscripts and court records rather than in any living legal practice. It carries no technical meaning beyond its equivalence to impeach or accuse in the contexts where it surfaces.
Common Confusion
IMPESCARE should not be mistaken for a term with independent substantive content. It is a scribal and record-keeping variant — a Latin form used to express what modern law calls impeachment or accusation. Researchers encountering impescatus in a historical document can treat it as equivalent to "impeached" without reading additional procedural or conceptual weight into the archaic form.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of impescare is paleographic and translational: a researcher working through medieval plea rolls, court records, or ecclesiastical proceedings may encounter the term and need to identify it quickly. Because it does not appear in modern legal usage and is absent from most general Latin dictionaries, it can momentarily stall work on historical sources.
Several practical points are worth noting. First, the term's derivation from Old French empescher connects it to the broader family of impeachment-related vocabulary. Researchers tracing the linguistic history of impeachment — a concept with significant constitutional dimensions — may find impescare relevant as evidence of how the concept was rendered into law Latin in English record-keeping. Second, Bouvier's citation to Blount (Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary, 1670) and the consistent attribution across Black's and Burrill to the same source means this term's documentation chain is short. Researchers seeking the primary source should go directly to Blount rather than expecting further elaboration in secondary dictionaries. Third, the term does not appear to have generated any case law or statutory usage, so corpus searching on impescare will yield archival and dictionary hits rather than doctrinal material.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in full agreement. Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Bouvier all define impescare as equivalent to "to impeach or accuse" and cite impescatus as its past participial form. All trace the authority to Blount's Nomo-Lexicon. Burrill adds the most linguistic detail, explicitly noting the derivation from the Law French empescher, which situates the term within the well-documented transition from Law French to Law Latin in English legal record-keeping.
The Bouvier entry is worth flagging: one of the two Bouvier passages retrieved appears to be misattributed or garbled, referencing citations to "6 Paige 288" and "1 Dan. Ch. Pr." in connection with "exceptionable matter with certainty" — language and citations that plainly belong to a different Bouvier entry on impeachment of evidence or pleading, not to this term. Researchers using digitized versions of Bouvier should be alert to this kind of indexing or OCR artifact, where content from adjacent entries bleeds into the record for a neighboring headword.
Beyond Blount, no historical dictionary consulted offers independent authority or additional examples of impescare in use. The term's historical footprint is narrow.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Impeachment (Constitutional and Historical); Law French and Law Latin in English Legal Records.