Definition
Impetratio (also anglicized as impetration) is a term from medieval Latin legal usage meaning the act of obtaining something by request or petition. In historical English legal practice, the term carried two distinct applications:
1. Writs and liberties: The obtaining of writs or legal privileges through formal petition or prayer to the court or Crown. Used in this sense in classical common law texts to describe the procedural act of securing a writ before litigation commenced.
2. Ecclesiastical impetration: The pre-obtaining of benefices, church offices, or other ecclesiastical appointments by petitioning the court of Rome — that is, securing a papal grant to a church living before the position had actually fallen vacant, in anticipation of future vacancy. This practice was the subject of direct statutory prohibition in medieval English law.
Common Confusion
The two applications of this term are easy to conflate in historical sources. The general procedural meaning (obtaining writs by petition) appears in treatise contexts and concerns secular court practice. The ecclesiastical meaning (pre-obtaining benefices from Rome) appears in statutory contexts and is a distinct legal wrong — a form of interference with the Crown's and lords' rights of presentation. A researcher encountering impetratio in a Bracton or Fleta passage is reading about writ procedure; the same term in a statute of Edward III refers to the ecclesiastical offense. Treat context as determinative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially confined to historical legal sources and will not appear in modern case law or contemporary legal materials. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in one of two contexts:
First, in treatise literature. Bracton and Fleta, both cited by Burrill, use impetratio in their discussions of writ procedure and the mechanics of bringing actions. In this context the term is part of the vocabulary of early common law pleading and practice, describing how a party initiates proceedings by obtaining a writ from Chancery.
Second, in parliamentary statutes of the fourteenth century directed against the practice of seeking papal provisions and pre-appointments to English church livings. The statutes of Edward III — particularly those addressing praemunire and provisors — target the ecclesiastical version of impetration directly. Burrill's truncated citation (Stat. 25 Edw. III, Stat. 38 Edw.) points to the Statutes of Provisors (1351) and related legislation, which treated the obtaining of papal appointments to English benefices as an encroachment on royal prerogative and the rights of lay patrons.
The key trap for researchers: because impetratio appears in both procedural and ecclesiastical statutory contexts, source type matters enormously. Do not carry a definition from one context into the other. The term's Latin root — impetrare, to obtain by entreaty or prayer — provides the conceptual thread, but the legal consequences and surrounding doctrine diverge sharply between contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is concise but covers the essential ground. He identifies the Latin derivation, notes both the writ-practice application (citing Bracton and Fleta) and the statutory ecclesiastical application (citing the Edwardian provisors legislation), and anglicizes the term as impetration. The entry is characteristic of Burrill's approach to obsolete Latin terms: accurate, sourced to recognized authorities, and not padded. What the entry does not do is explain the political and constitutional stakes of the ecclesiastical usage — the contest between the papacy and the English Crown over appointments to benefices was a central tension of fourteenth-century English governance, and the statutes targeting impetratio were part of a sustained legislative effort to subordinate papal influence over English church offices to royal control. Historical dictionaries generally treat this term as a terminological curiosity; the fuller story is in the provisors legislation and in ecclesiastical legal history.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to medieval English legal history and the pre-Reformation relationship between English law and the Roman curia. It has no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions and does not appear in American legal materials.