Definition
An archaic Law French term carrying two recorded meanings: (1) "lately" or "recently," used as a temporal qualifier in pleading and other legal contexts; and (2) "loss," used generally to denote damage or deprivation. The term appears in medieval English legal writing as part of the Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary that dominated common law pleading before the gradual shift to English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering JATARDE in primary sources should be alert to context before assigning meaning. The two recorded definitions — a temporal adverb and a noun of loss — are functionally unrelated, and the surrounding text will usually be the only guide to which sense is operative. The temporal meaning ("lately") appears in contexts where a pleader is establishing the recency of an act or event; the loss meaning surfaces where damage or deprivation is being alleged.
Because Law French was not a living vernacular but a technical legal dialect preserved largely through manuscript transmission and later abridgments, spellings of terms like this one were not standardized. Variant spellings in archival sources should be anticipated. Researchers consulting printed Year Books, plea rolls, or early abridgments may find the word rendered differently without change of meaning.
The term has no continuing life in modern legal usage. It functions as a period marker: its presence in a source signals either a medieval original or a later text deliberately preserving or quoting Law French vocabulary, such as an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century dictionary or abridgment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole identified shelf source. Burrill attributes both definitions to Kelham — that is, Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), a standard reference for Law French vocabulary. Burrill offers no further elaboration, glossing the temporal meaning as "lately" and the loss meaning as "loss, generally," without providing documentary examples or distinguishing the contexts in which each meaning was employed.
The brevity of the entry reflects the term's marginal status even within Law French lexicography. Kelham's work, from which Burrill drew, was itself a compilation from older sources, and the two definitions may derive from different manuscript traditions or different periods of usage rather than representing a genuinely polysemous term with stable dual meaning. Researchers should treat the "loss" definition with particular caution: without illustrative examples, it is difficult to assess how widely this usage circulated or whether it was idiosyncratic to particular documents or jurisdictions within the medieval common law system.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Bouvier, Tomlin, Black, or Wharton — appear to carry an entry for this term, which underscores its obscurity and reinforces the point that Burrill-to-Kelham is likely the full extent of documented authority.
Jurisdictional Note
Law French terms of this period operated within the English common law tradition. Scots law, which developed its own distinct legal vocabulary, would not be a relevant jurisdiction for this term.