Definition
A Latin legal term meaning to run into, fall into, or become subject to a legal consequence, penalty, or liability. Used in classical and medieval legal Latin to express the moment at which a person becomes bound by an obligation or exposed to a penalty — the act of incurring. In practice, incurrere described the operative event by which liability attached: a party did not merely face a consequence, but ran into it by virtue of their own act or omission.
The related noun form, incurramentum, appears in old records with substantially the same meaning, denoting the fact or state of having incurred a penalty or forfeiture.
Why It Matters in Research
INCURRERE is a term of medieval and early modern legal Latin, not a term of contemporary legal practice. Researchers will encounter it in:
— Latin writs, pleadings, and ecclesiastical records from the medieval period through the early modern era.
— Scottish legal sources, where the vernacular form inrine or in-run appears as a direct adaptation. Researchers working in Scots law records should be alert to this phonetic translation; the underlying legal concept is the same, but the word form changes dramatically across document types.
— Old English and Anglo-Norman administrative records where incurramentum is the noun of record, particularly in accounts of forfeitures, amercements, and penalties imposed on tenants or officers.
The key research trap is mistaking incurrere for a purely passive or descriptive term. In medieval usage, incurrere carried an active sense — the party ran into the liability by their own conduct. This is legally significant in contexts where the question is whether liability arose automatically upon a triggering act or required a separate judicial declaration. Documents using incurrere tend to signal the former: liability attached by operation of the act itself.
Researchers transcribing or translating Latin records should not conflate incurrere with subire (to undergo) or pati (to suffer), both of which imply a more passive reception of a legal consequence rather than the self-directed running-into that incurrere connotes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term, and its entry is characteristically terse but precise. Burrill correctly traces the compound construction (in + currere) and cross-references Cowell's Interpreter, the standard early English legal Latin glossary, which confirms the meaning. Burrill also preserves the Scottish vernacular equivalents (inrine, in-run), a detail of genuine value to researchers in Scots legal records that more modern glossaries omit entirely.
The reference to incurramentum in old records is significant. Burrill flags it without elaborating, but the noun form is the form most likely to appear in administrative documents — particularly in accounts of amercements and penalties — where the abstract fact of having incurred a liability needed to be recorded. Researchers should treat incurramentum as the documentary noun correlate of the verbal incurrere.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources on this term. The concept is stable and narrow. What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is contextual guidance on how to distinguish incurrere from neighboring Latin verbs of liability (subire, incidere, obnoxium esse) in cases of ambiguous drafting — a gap researchers must fill through contextual and comparative reading.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily encountered in English ecclesiastical and common law records and in Scottish legal sources. The Scottish vernacular variants (inrine, in-run) signal a distinct documentary tradition and should be treated as jurisdictionally specific adaptations rather than synonyms for research purposes.