Definition
A Latin term from old European law meaning to cry out for a person or to summon them to court, as a crier does by public proclamation. The related participial form, inclamatus, describes a person who has been proclaimed, called, or summoned by such proclamation — that is, formally cited to appear before a tribunal through public announcement rather than private delivery of process.
Why It Matters in Research
INCLAMARE is a term of very limited circulation, appearing primarily in sources treating early medieval and late Roman-influenced European law. Researchers encountering it will do so almost exclusively in texts dealing with the Edict of Theodoric or in glossaries and digests of early Germanic and continental legal procedure, rather than in English common law materials. Burrill traces it to the Edictum Theodorici (c. 500 A.D.) and to Spelman's glossary, which situates the term firmly in the post-Roman continental tradition.
The practical research implication is narrow but specific: when working through early medieval legal texts, formularies, or diplomatic records that describe court procedure, INCLAMARE and INCLAMATUS signal a particular mode of compulsory process — public proclamation — as distinct from personal service or written citation. Understanding this distinction helps researchers interpret procedural passages in sources where the method of summoning had direct legal consequences, including whether a party's default or absence could be treated as contumacy.
Researchers should not expect to find this term in English Year Books, Bracton, or the standard common law glossaries. Its natural habitat is Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum and similar antiquarian compilations of continental and Romano-Germanic legal vocabulary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. His treatment is concise and accurate in its derivation: in (toward or upon) combined with clamare (to cry out or call), yielding the procedural sense of a court crier calling a party to appear. Burrill cross-references the Edict of Theodoric, chapter 145, and Spelman — the two sources that would have been available to any nineteenth-century legal antiquarian treating this subject.
No substantive divergence exists among historical sources on this term's meaning, for the simple reason that so few sources address it at all. The meaning is stable and narrow: public proclamation as a mode of judicial summoning. What historical dictionaries do not address, and what remains outside the scope of Burrill's brief entry, is how this mode of process related to consequences for non-appearance — a question that would require direct engagement with the Edict of Theodoric itself and with secondary scholarship on early medieval court procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to the legal vocabulary of early continental European law, specifically the Romano-Germanic tradition reflected in the Edict of Theodoric. It has no recognized technical meaning in English common law or in any modern jurisdiction's statutes or rules.