Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "to injure" or "to do wrong to another." Drawn from the root *injuria* (unlawful harm or wrong), *injuriare* appears in medieval legal texts as a verb form—the act of inflicting injury or wrongful harm upon a person. The past participle form, *injuriatum*, means "injured" or "wronged." The term belongs to the Latin legal vocabulary of early common law and is encountered primarily in Bracton, Fleta, and the Registrum Originale rather than in modern legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker more than a working legal concept. Researchers encountering *injuriare* in primary sources are almost certainly working in medieval or early common law materials—Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae* or Fleta, both foundational treatises of 13th-century English law. The term does not survive into modern legal vocabulary as an operative word; its doctrinal content migrated into the developed common law concepts of *injuria*, tort, and trespass.
The key trap: researchers searching for the substantive law of injury or wrongdoing in early sources should not anchor on *injuriare* as a term of art. It functions grammatically—as a verb denoting the act—rather than as a defined legal category. The doctrinal weight sits in *injuria* (the noun), which carries the elaborated meaning of unlawful wrong in Bracton and later civilian-influenced common law commentary. *Injuriare* is the act; *injuria* is the concept.
When cross-referencing Bracton's folio 45b or Fleta book 4, chapter 27, researchers should treat *injuriare* as part of the Latin prose structure of those texts rather than as a standalone searchable term with independent doctrinal significance. Corpus searches for this exact verb form will be sparse; broader searches under *injuria* and its derivatives will return the relevant material.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole shelf-source entry. Burrill defines *injuriare* tersely and accurately: "to injure," with the participle *injuriatum* glossed as "injured," and supplies three primary source citations—the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 150b), Bracton (fol. 45b), and Fleta (lib. 4, c. 27, § 16). This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Latin verbal forms from medieval sources: functional glosses with precise folio references, without doctrinal elaboration.
No other historical dictionary in the standard common law shelf (Black's, Bouvier's, Jacob's, Tomlin's) appears to carry a dedicated entry for *injuriare* as a distinct headword, which itself signals the term's limited independent standing. Its absence from those dictionaries confirms that the verb form was not treated as a term of art requiring separate legal definition—its meaning was considered adequately covered by the entry for *injuria*.
Burrill's three citations are reliable anchors for primary source research. Bracton folio 45b and Fleta book 4 are available in scholarly editions and digitized manuscript collections, making direct verification straightforward.