Definition
A Latin verb from the civil and common law tradition meaning "to put in," "to put upon," or "to impose." In old English legal practice, the term appeared most directly in procedural contexts involving bail, particularly in the phrase *imposuit commune ballium* — "he put in common bail" — denoting the formal act of entering common bail on behalf of a defendant in a legal proceeding. More broadly, the term carried the sense of placing an obligation, charge, or burden upon a person or thing, a usage that fed into the legal noun *impositio* and the range of concepts grouped under imposition in English law.
Why It Matters in Research
IMPONERE is an operational term embedded in early English procedural practice rather than a doctrinal concept with a life of its own. Researchers encountering it in old reports and Year Books should read it as a procedural marker — it signals that a party has formally entered or lodged something, typically bail, in a court record. The phrase *imposuit commune ballium* specifically indicates entry of common bail, a standard procedural step in personal actions before the abolition of common bail in English practice during the nineteenth century. Researchers working with pre-reform English pleading records, particularly from King's Bench and Common Pleas, will find this language in early reports such as Salkeld's Reports, where the term appears in brief notations of procedural steps rather than in substantive legal argument.
The broader sense — to impose a burden, tax, penalty, or obligation — links IMPONERE to a wide network of Latin legal terms appearing in equity, ecclesiastical, and civil law sources. When scanning digitized Latin-text legal manuscripts or abridgments, researchers should be alert to context: the procedural sense (putting in bail) and the substantive sense (imposing a charge or duty) can appear in close proximity without clear demarcation. Historical indexers did not always distinguish them.
Because the term feeds directly into IMPOSITIO — the noun form — researchers who find IMPONERE in a source should consult the IMPOSITIO entry for the fuller doctrinal treatment of impositions, particularly the constitutional controversy over the Crown's power to impose duties without parliamentary consent, a live dispute from the early seventeenth century onward.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats IMPONERE economically, supplying the Latin root analysis (in + ponere, to put in or upon) and the direct procedural illustration from Salkeld — *imposuit commune ballium* — before pivoting immediately to the separate entry for IMPORT, suggesting that Burrill viewed IMPONERE as a brief cross-reference point rather than a term requiring extended treatment. This compression is typical of Burrill's handling of Latin procedural verbs: he records the usage, anchors it with a citation, and moves on, leaving the substantive doctrine to the noun form IMPOSITIO.
What Burrill does not address is the verb's broader civil law and ecclesiastical law usage, where IMPONERE carried significant weight in discussions of duties, burdens, and canonical obligations placed upon persons or property. Researchers relying solely on Burrill for this term will capture the procedural bail usage accurately but will miss the wider doctrinal context that civil law and ecclesiastical sources require.