Definition
To maim. A Latin verb used in medieval English legal texts to describe the act of inflicting a maiming injury upon another person — that is, depriving them of a limb or bodily member in a manner that diminished their capacity to fight or defend themselves. The term is the verbal form underlying the substantive offense of mayhem (also spelled maim or maihem), and appears in writs, indictments, and pleading records of the old common law courts.
Common Confusion
MAIHEMARE, MAYHEM, and MAIM occupy overlapping but distinct positions in legal vocabulary. Maihemare is the Latin verbal form used in formal pleading and legal instruments; maim and mayhem are the anglicized equivalents that dominate both legal and common usage from the early modern period onward. Researchers encountering maihemare in a medieval writ or Year Book entry should understand it as the operative verb charging the act, not a separate or more specific offense. The substantive crime is typically indexed in historical sources under MAYHEM or MAIM, not under this Latin infinitive.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational challenge rather than a doctrinal concept. Researchers are unlikely to encounter maihemare except in Latin pleading records, Year Books, or dictionaries that transcribe those sources directly — as Burrill does, citing Keilw. 95 (Keilwey's Reports, a Year Book-style reporter from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries). The term will not appear in anglicized abridgments, digests, or treatises, which uniformly use maim or mayhem.
The practical trap is indexing: a researcher working through manuscript plea rolls or early printed law reporters may encounter maihemare as the charging verb without recognizing it as the equivalent of mayhem. Conversely, a researcher working backward from mayhem doctrine into Latin sources will need this term to locate the corresponding pleading language.
Note also that Burrill's entry for maihemare is unusually compressed — the definition is given in a single line and immediately followed by adjacent entries (MAINBOUR, MAINOUR) that are entirely unrelated. This reflects the alphabetical compression common in nineteenth-century law dictionaries and means that substantive discussion of the underlying offense is found elsewhere, typically under MAYHEM or MAIM.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only source entry here, and it is minimal: "L. Lat. In old English law. To maim." with a single citation to Keilwey's Reports. The entry's brevity is itself informative — Burrill treats maihemare as a cross-reference term whose substance is carried elsewhere, not as a freestanding doctrinal entry. The citation to Keilw. 95 anchors the term in the late Year Book period, consistent with Latin pleading practice that persisted in English courts well into the sixteenth century before gradual displacement by English-language instruments.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides an independent entry for maihemare. The underlying offense it describes — mayhem — receives substantially fuller treatment in Burrill, Bouvier, and related sources, where the elements, historical scope, and common law development are addressed at length.
Jurisdictional Note
Maihemare as a Latin pleading term is specific to the English common law tradition and its early American successors. It has no independent life in civil law or ecclesiastical court practice. American legal sources after the colonial period use only the anglicized forms.