Definition
To give, grant, and assure a thing by means of a written instrument. The term describes the act of formally conveying or securing rights, title, or obligations through a written document — that is, to put something into a charter or deed and thereby establish it with legal certainty. The emphasis is not merely on the transfer itself but on the use of writing as the instrument that gives the transaction legal effect.
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Why It Matters in Research
INCHARTARE is a term of medieval Latin origin that appears almost exclusively in historical legal materials — ecclesiastical records, early common law pleadings, land conveyance documents, and glossaries of Latin legal terms. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in any modern legal instrument or judicial opinion, but it surfaces in annotated editions of early English legal texts, in digests of pre-Conquest and post-Conquest land grants, and in scholarly treatments of the development of the deed as a legal form.
The term's significance for corpus research lies less in its independent doctrinal weight than in what it signals about the document in which it appears. Where INCHARTARE or its variants appear, the researcher is almost certainly working with a formal conveyance or grant intended to be legally operative and binding — not a mere memorandum or informal agreement. This is useful when assessing the legal character of ambiguous historical instruments.
Researchers should be alert to the relationship between this term and the broader history of written instruments as a requirement for valid conveyance. At early common law, livery of seisin — a physical, symbolic act — was the operative step in transferring freehold land; the written charter was originally secondary, serving as evidence rather than operative conveyance. INCHARTARE, by contrast, frames the writing itself as the constitutive act of giving and assuring. This tension between symbolic delivery and written instrument runs through centuries of property law history and is worth tracing when the term appears in primary sources.
The term does not appear in American case law in any meaningful volume. Its presence in American legal dictionaries (including Rapalje & Lawrence) reflects the tradition of including Latin and Law French terms drawn from English legal history, not any domestic doctrinal use.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in complete agreement, reproducing the same definition with no variation: to give, or grant, and assure anything by a written instrument. This uniformity suggests that by the time these dictionaries were compiled in the late nineteenth century, the term had no living contested meaning — it was a historical artifact being catalogued rather than a working legal concept being defined.
Rapalje & Lawrence is marginally more useful for contextual placement, as the entry immediately precedes their definition of INCHOATE and touches on the instrument-based nature of legal assurance. This adjacency is coincidental (alphabetical), but it does situate INCHARTARE within a cluster of terms concerned with legal formality and the completeness of legal acts — a useful frame for researchers approaching early conveyancing materials.
None of the three dictionaries provide illustrative examples, historical citations, or cross-references to specific instruments or legal authorities. This is a notable limitation. Researchers seeking deeper analysis of the term as it functioned in medieval and early modern English law will need to look beyond these dictionaries to specialized glossaries of Latin legal terms, such as Du Cange's Glossarium or Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, which provide richer documentary context.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Deed; History of Written Conveyances; Livery of Seisin.
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