Definition
In old English law, to travel about on official judicial circuit; to go on the iter, eyre, or circuit. The term describes the act of royal justices riding through the counties of England to hold courts, hear pleas, and administer justice on behalf of the Crown. It is the verbal form underlying the noun iter and the related institution of the eyre, and appears in medieval legal Latin records to describe the formal act of judicial perambulation through a county or series of counties.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal records and treatises, particularly in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which is the primary source Burrill cites. Researchers working with early English judicial records — pipe rolls, eyre rolls, plea rolls, and similar materials — will encounter itineraverunt (third person plural perfect: "they traveled on circuit") and the gerundive construction ad itinerandum per comitatum as formulaic phrases marking the authority and scope of judicial visitations. The term is not found in modern legal usage and functions purely as a navigational marker in historical English legal sources.
The practical research trap is treating itinerare as merely descriptive travel language. In context, it is a term of legal art: the act of itinerating was the jurisdictional foundation for the eyre court. Royal justices held authority only within the counties they were commissioned to circuit; the verb therefore signals both the physical movement and the formal exercise of delegated royal judicial power. When Bracton uses ad itinerandum per comitatus tales, he is describing the jurisdictional grant, not a travel itinerary.
Researchers should also note the temporal boundaries. Itinerare as an active institution belongs to the period of the general eyre, roughly the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. The general eyre fell into disuse after the mid-fourteenth century, so this term in primary sources is a reliable indicator of date range. Its presence in a document helps place that document within the era of Angevin and early Plantagenet judicial administration.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise. He correctly derives itinerare from iter (the journey or circuit itself) and ties it directly to the eyre, providing the two Bracton citations — folio 109 and 109b — as the anchoring authority. No other sources in the Law Mind shelf treat this term independently. Burrill's treatment is consistent with the broader scholarly understanding of the eyre system: the verb and the institution are inseparable, and neither can be understood without the other.
What Burrill does not provide, and what researchers should seek elsewhere, is any discussion of how itinerant justice functioned procedurally — the commissions of oyer and terminer, gaol delivery, and the articles of the eyre that structured what justices did once they arrived. For that context, Bracton itself and the historical scholarship on the eyre rolls are necessary supplements.