Definition
To make a brief written record; to inventory or register in summary form. In old English legal practice, inbreviare described the act of setting down a short written account of goods or chattels, particularly in the context of an official taking possession of or accounting for property. The term appears most often in connection with the attachment and inventorying of the chattels of a deceased person found within a lay fee — that is, property held by secular rather than ecclesiastical tenure.
Why It Matters in Research
INBREVIARE is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in medieval and early English legal texts, records of ecclesiastical administration, and commentaries on Magna Carta and its successor statutes. It is not a term with a living procedural counterpart under that name, but the function it describes — official inventory of a decedent's goods — persists in probate and administration practice under different terminology.
The pairing of attachiare et inbreviare in the Magna Carta passage cited by Burrill is instructive: the two acts were formally distinct. Attachment (attachiare) secured or seized the property; inbreviare was the documentation step, the making of a written list or brief account. Researchers working with medieval ecclesiastical court records, early probate administration materials, or dispute records concerning chattels of the dead should be alert to both terms appearing together as a standard procedural formula.
Because the term is rooted in Latin administrative usage, it will appear in its Latin form in original sources and in Latinized English legal texts of the medieval and early modern periods. Translations or abstracts of such records may render it as "to inventory," "to register," or "to make a brief of," without preserving the Latin. Researchers relying on translated or summarized records may therefore miss the specific procedural character of the act.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving lexicographic treatment of this term. Burrill derives inbreviare from the Latin in and brevis (short), connecting it to the broader family of legal terms associated with written summaries and registers — the same root that yields breviarium (an abridgment or brief) and, ultimately, the English legal term "brief." Burrill's illustrative passage draws directly from the Magna Carta provision associated with 9 Henry III, the 1225 reissue, which addressed the rights of the crown and others in relation to the chattels of deceased persons found on lay fees. The passage — attachiare et inbreviare catalla defuncti inventa in laico feodo — is a compressed procedural formula: attach and inventory the chattels of the deceased found in lay fee.
No equivalent treatment appears in modern legal dictionaries, as the term has passed entirely out of active use. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as the authoritative secondary source for this term and go to the primary Magna Carta text and its commentators (including Coke's Second Institutes) for contextual elaboration of the underlying procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
Inbreviare is specific to medieval English law and appears in materials relating to English ecclesiastical and common law administration of decedents' estates. It has no recognized application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as an independent legal term.