Definition
In old European law, to cite or summon a person to court. The term derives from the mallum, the public assembly or court of justice used among early Germanic peoples, and mallare describes the act of formally calling a party to appear before that body. It is a verb of procedure, not of substance — it names the act of compulsion to attend, not any underlying claim or judgment.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of deep historical specificity. Researchers encounter mallare almost exclusively in early medieval legal sources — primarily the Lex Salica (Salic Law), the Leges Alamannorum, and the Leges Baiuvariorum — and in the antiquarian scholarship built around them. It will not appear in common law sources, equity treatises, or any jurisdiction deriving from English legal tradition. Its presence in a document is a reliable signal that the text engages with Frankish, Alemannic, or Bavarian customary law, or with Spelman-era scholarship on Germanic legal antiquities.
Burrill's citation trail is useful here: the references to L. Salic. tit. 52 § 2, L. Alaman. tit. 36 § 3, and L. Boior. tit. 1 c. 11 § 2 point researchers directly to the primary Germanic law codes. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the English-language antiquarian bridge between those sources and later legal dictionaries. Any Law Mind corpus search touching medieval continental procedure, the mallum, or Germanic customary law should treat mallare as a related indexing term, even where it does not appear explicitly.
Researchers working in ecclesiastical history or early feudal tenure sources may also encounter the term in glossaries and marginalia, where it sometimes carries a looser sense of any formal calling-to-account, though this usage is derivative of the procedural original.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole source dictionary for this entry, and his treatment is appropriately compressed: he defines mallare functionally (to cite or summon to court), anchors it etymologically in mallum, and provides three primary law code citations plus the Spelman reference. There is little more to say at the definitional level, and Burrill does not overreach.
What Burrill does not address is the procedural mechanics that surrounded mallare in practice — the required repetition of summons, the consequences of non-appearance (which in Salic law could escalate toward outlawry), or the distinction between the initial citation and subsequent stages of compulsion. These matters are visible in the primary codes he cites, but they fall outside the scope of a dictionary entry. Researchers needing that procedural texture should go directly to the Lex Salica and to modern scholarship on Frankish legal procedure.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical legal dictionaries on this term. It is narrow, archaic, and not subject to the doctrinal drift that complicates research into terms with living legal significance.
Jurisdictional Note
Mallare has no application in any modern jurisdiction. It belongs entirely to the pre-common-law Germanic legal tradition. Researchers should treat it as a terminus technicus of early medieval continental law, without analogue or survival in Anglo-American, civilian, or canon law systems.