Definition
A Latin and Law Latin term used in old English legal records and pleadings to denote an indictment — a formal written accusation presented by a grand jury charging a named person with a criminal offense. The term is the Latin nominal form corresponding to the English word "indictment" and appears in medieval and early modern English legal instruments, registers, and treatises where Latin was the operative language of record. It carries no meaning distinct from indictment itself; it is simply the Latin designation for that instrument.
Common Confusion
INDICTAMENTUM is not a substantive legal concept separate from INDICTMENT. Researchers encountering the term in original sources should treat it as the Latin equivalent of indictment and follow the doctrine, procedure, and case law attached to that term. The distinction is linguistic and historical, not legal.
Why It Matters in Research
The term surfaces almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal materials — particularly in the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Original Writs), in Fleta, and in Coke's commentaries — where Latin remained the formal language of pleading and record. Researchers working with manuscript court rolls, plea rolls, or printed editions of the old register books will encounter INDICTAMENTUM as a routine designation for indictment instruments.
Two navigational points matter. First, the term does not appear in modern common law materials; any occurrence dates the source to a period before English displaced Latin in legal proceedings (generally before the Pleading in English Act of 1362 displaced Latin in oral pleadings, and before parliamentary statutes in the eighteenth century completed the transition in written records). Finding the term anchors a document to a particular stratum of the corpus. Second, because INDICTAMENTUM simply labels the instrument, the substantive legal rules governing validity, form, and effect are found under INDICTMENT in later English and American authorities — not under this term. Researchers should use INDICTAMENTUM as a pointer term only and pivot immediately to INDICTMENT for doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a lean but reliable entry: "L. Lat. In old English law. An indictment." The three supporting references — the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 169b), Fleta (lib. 1, c. 34, § 39), and Coke upon Littleton (Co. Litt. 126b) — are the standard citation cluster for this term and accurately reflect the range of old authorities where it appears. Burrill does not attempt to distinguish the Latin term from its English counterpart because no such distinction exists; the entry is definitionally complete for what the term does.
What Burrill does not provide, and what no single historical dictionary entry covers, is any account of the procedural context surrounding indictments in the period when INDICTAMENTUM was current — the role of the grand jury, the formal requirements of the instrument, or the relationship between indictment and presentment. Those matters are addressed in the substantive entries under INDICTMENT and PRESENTMENT in the historical dictionaries and in Coke, Hale, and Hawkins.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs exclusively to the English legal tradition and its early American colonial inheritance. It does not appear in civilian or canon law sources in this form and has no independent meaning in modern American or British law.