KARRATA - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

KARRATAAuthored

The Law Mind • 433 words

Definition

A cart-load. A unit of measure appearing in medieval English records used to quantify bulk goods transported by cart. The term functioned as a measure of quantity rather than a fixed standard of weight or volume, with its practical meaning dependent on the type of goods being recorded and local custom.

Why It Matters in Research

KARRATA is the kind of term that stops a researcher cold when encountered in a medieval deed, manorial roll, or account record. It appears in contexts involving agricultural produce, timber, peat, or other bulk materials where transport by cart was the common method of conveyance. Researchers should be aware that it carries no standardized legal definition beyond the basic gloss of "cart-load" — the actual quantity it represents varies by commodity and locale. It is not a term of art with legal consequences attached; rather, it is a descriptive unit embedded in the documentary language of estate administration and conveyancing. When tracing property rights, rent obligations, or service duties in historical English records, encountering KARRATA signals that a quantified burden or transfer of goods is being described, but the researcher must look to surrounding context and comparable period records to determine the practical amount involved. It does not appear in modern legal usage and has no surviving statutory or common law definition.

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement: KARRATA means, in old records, a cart-load, with all three sources citing Cowell's Interpreter and Blount's Law Dictionary as authority. This is a case of near-complete uniformity across the historical shelf, which itself signals that the term was already archaic by the time these dictionaries were compiled — the lexicographers were faithfully copying from antiquarian sources rather than drawing on living legal usage. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry attributed to KARRATA in the source material does not in fact define this term; that passage concerns the maxim justitia non debet claudicare and the law of arrest, and appears to be a cataloguing error rather than substantive legal content for this entry. Researchers should disregard it as unrelated. No historical dictionary source provides granular detail on how KARRATA functioned as a measure across different commodities or regions, which is consistent with the term's limited role as descriptive record language rather than operative legal terminology.

KARRATAmain

Rapalje & Lawrence • 1888

(711) justitia non debet claudicare; et celeris, quia dilatio est quædam negatio (2 Inst. 56): Justice ought to be unbought, because nothing is more hateful than venal justice; full, for justice ought not to halt. and quick, for delay is a kind of denial. where an officer or his assistant, in the due execution of his office, arrests, or attempts to arrest, a person for felony, or a dangerous wound given, and he having notice thereof flies, and is killed by such officer or assistant in pursuit; (5) where, upon such offence as last described, a private person, in whose sight it has been committed, arrests, or endeavors to arrest, the offender, and kills him in resistance, Justitia est virtus excellens et or flight, under similar circumstances. Altissimo complacens (4 Inst. 58): JusJustitia est duplex: viz., severe puniens et vere præveniens (3 Inst. Epil.): Justice is double; punishing severely, and truly preventing. 3. Where committed for the preventice is excellent virtue and pleasing to the Most tion of any forcible or atrocious crime, but High. not if the crime is unaccompanied by force. 24. When two persons, being shipwrecked, get on the same plank, but finding it not able to save them both, one of them thrusts the other from it, whereby he is drowned. This is justifiable upon the great universal principle of self preservation. 4 Steph. Com. (7 edit.) 48. See HOMICIDE, § 4.