Definition
Without delay; immediately. A Latin term of art used in old English legal practice as a formal word of command in writs, directing that something be done without postponement or deferral. The term operates as an intensifier within the writ formula, signaling that the action required admits of no lawful delay on the part of the officer or party addressed.
Why It Matters in Research
INDILATE is a formulaic term encountered almost exclusively in the register of original writs and the procedural texts of medieval and early modern English practice. Researchers working with writs in the Registrum Brevium or with Fleta and similar treatises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries will encounter it as part of standard writ language rather than as a term carrying independent doctrinal weight. Its significance is positional: its presence in a writ signals the urgency or mandatory character of the command issued.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that INDILATE carries no substantive legal meaning beyond its procedural role as a timing directive. It does not create a legal standard, define a cause of action, or establish a test. When annotating or transcribing writs from manuscript sources or early printed registers, misreading the term or treating it as a substantive legal concept will produce interpretive error. It is properly read as the functional equivalent of language such as "forthwith" or "without delay" in later writ and statutory drafting.
Because the term is drawn from Law Latin and confined to old English writ practice, it will not appear in American legal materials and is absent from equity or common law doctrinal literature as a term of substance. Its presence in a research source is a reliable marker that the surrounding material belongs to the procedural forms of pre-modern English common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary authority among the historical dictionaries for this term. He derives INDILATE from the Latin privative prefix in- combined with dilatus, the past participle of differre, meaning to delay or postpone. The compound thus yields the sense of something not delayed. Burrill cites the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 128b, c. 47, § 4) and Fleta (lib. 2) as the source texts, both of which are foundational documents of medieval English writ practice.
No other major historical law dictionaries — including Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Bouvier's — carry an entry for INDILATE, which reflects the term's narrow scope and its obsolescence outside the specific textual tradition of the register of writs. The absence of the term from American legal dictionaries, including Bouvier, is expected: American practice never adopted the Registrum Brevium forms as operative legal instruments, and Law Latin formulae of this character did not travel into the American common law tradition as working vocabulary.
Burrill's entry is brief but accurate. There is nothing in the surrounding literature to contradict his account; the limitation of the entry is simply that it does no more than identify the term and supply its literal meaning, leaving the researcher to reconstruct its procedural context from the cited sources independently.
Jurisdictional Note
INDILATE is specific to old English writ practice and has no recognized application in any American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdiction outside its original medieval English context. It is a research term, not an operative legal term, in any modern system.