Definition
In old English law, a person who has been impeached, accused, or formally charged with an offence. The term functions as a noun or adjective describing the accused party in a proceeding — the one against whom a charge has been laid. It appears primarily in Latin legal records and early English legal texts and carries no modern procedural equivalent by name, though the concept maps directly onto the contemporary notion of a criminal defendant or accused person.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the Latin stratum of early English legal vocabulary and will appear almost exclusively in pre-Norman Conquest and early post-Conquest Latin records, including law codes, plea rolls, and chronicle accounts of legal proceedings. Researchers working in that period should treat impetitus as a passive participle functioning substantively — it identifies the accused as a category of legal actor with defined procedural standing, not merely a descriptive label.
The root verb impetere is the critical connection. Burrill cross-references impetere directly, and researchers should follow that thread: understanding what it meant to impeach or charge in early English law — including the mechanisms of accusation available, such as appeal of felony, presentment, or compurgation — is essential to interpreting any passage where impetitus appears. The term will not appear in later common law sources using English or law French, and any appearance in post-medieval records likely signals deliberate archaism or scholarly quotation rather than live legal usage.
The citation in Burrill to the Leges Henrici Primi (LL. Hen. I. c. 6) is significant. That text, dating to approximately 1114–1118, is one of the most important early compilations of English legal custom, though it is notoriously difficult to interpret and frequently misrepresents the law it purports to describe. Researchers consulting passages involving impetitus in that source should use a critical edition with commentary and be cautious about drawing procedural conclusions from its language alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the sole dictionary source here, and the entry is spare: a Latin-root identification, a translation cluster (impeached, accused, charged), and a citation to the Leges Henrici Primi with a secondary pointer to Spelman's Glossarium. The entry does exactly what a historical law dictionary should do for this class of term — it preserves the word, identifies its grammatical origin, and anchors it to a source text — but it offers nothing about procedural context or the distinction between different forms of accusation that impetitus might have encompassed.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, cited by Burrill, is a foundational reference for this category of Latin legal term. Researchers who need more than the bare definition should go there directly for fuller treatment of the word in its medieval context.
The absence of entries in Bouvier, Black, or other common law dictionaries is itself informative: impetitus had no living role in the developed common law tradition and was already an antiquarian term by the time those dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
Impetitus is exclusively an early English legal term. It has no counterpart in Scots law, canon law, or civil law systems under this name, though cognate Latin vocabulary for the accused appears across all those traditions.