Definition
A Latin verb found in medieval English legal texts meaning "to limit," "to bound," or "to fix a boundary or period." The term appears principally in contexts establishing temporal or spatial limits — most commonly, the fixing of time periods within which legal actions must be brought. It is the root from which the modern legal concepts of limitation and limitations of actions derive their name.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *limitare* in medieval or early modern English legal texts should recognize it as a term of art operating at the boundary between procedural and substantive law. Its most significant appearance is in discussions of what we now call statutes of limitations — the rules confining actions to specific time periods. The Bracton passage cited in Burrill (*Hodie fere omnes actiones infra certa tempora limitantur* — "at this day almost all actions are limited within certain periods") is a foundational reference, placing the concept firmly in thirteenth-century English common law doctrine.
Two research traps are worth flagging. First, the term can refer either to temporal limits (time to sue) or spatial limits (boundary of land or jurisdiction), and the surrounding text must be read carefully to determine which sense is operative. Second, because *limitare* is a Latin verbal form, it will appear in various conjugated shapes across manuscript sources — *limitantur*, *limitatur*, *limitavit*, *limitatum* — and search strategies in digitized Latin legal texts must account for these inflections rather than treating the dictionary headword as the searchable string.
Researchers working on the history of limitations doctrine should trace the line from Bracton's use of *limitantur* forward through the early statutes of limitation (beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to modern limitations law, using *limitare* and its cognates as the philological thread connecting those bodies of material.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source available for this entry, and his treatment is terse but precise. He correctly identifies the Latin root (*limes*, a boundary or path marking a limit), gives both senses (spatial boundary and temporal period), and anchors the definition with the Bracton citation. This is characteristic of Burrill's method with Latin terms of the old common law: a brief gloss, a Latin example, and a reference to a primary authority.
What Burrill does not do — and what no single-volume historical dictionary could be expected to do — is trace the legislative and doctrinal development from *limitare* as a concept to the enacted statutes of limitation that eventually codified temporal limits for specific actions. That development belongs to the encyclopedia and to treatise literature on limitations. The Bracton passage Burrill quotes (*fol. 102 b*) is genuine and significant; Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae* remains a critical primary source for early common law procedure, and the observation that "almost all actions are limited within certain periods" reflects a maturation of limitations doctrine that was already underway in the mid-thirteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Latin term of the medieval common law, *limitare* is not jurisdiction-specific in the way modern legal terms are. Its significance is primarily historical and applies equally to researchers working in English, early American, and other common law traditions that drew on Bracton and the Latin legal literature of the English courts.