Definition
A Latin term appearing in medieval English legal texts meaning "to marry" or "to give in marriage." The term carried specific legal force in feudal contexts, where the right to arrange the marriage of a ward or a widow held by a lord was a recognized and enforceable legal interest — not merely a social convention but a proprietary right with economic value.
In its narrowest usage, maritare denoted the act of marrying, but within the feudal system it implied the lord's power to compel or consent to marriage, particularly over heirs who held land as tenants in chief of the Crown. Magna Carta, chapter 7, is the principal source in which the term appears in historical English legal authority, where protections for widows against being compelled to marry were addressed.
Common Confusion
Maritare should not be confused with the broader cluster of feudal marriage-related terms. The right to present a ward for marriage (sometimes called "the marriage" or maritagium) is a related but distinct concept. Maritagium typically refers to the marriage portion or dowry — property conveyed with a woman upon her marriage — while maritare refers to the act or power of marrying itself. Burrill's entry places maritare immediately adjacent to maritima angliae, a wholly unrelated term concerning maritime revenues; researchers consulting microfilm or early print editions should take care not to run these entries together.
Why It Matters in Research
Maritare is a term of art confined almost entirely to medieval Latin legal texts and their early modern English commentaries. Researchers will encounter it principally in:
— Transcriptions and translations of Magna Carta and its successive confirmations, particularly provisions governing widows and heirs.
— Plea rolls and patent rolls from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where grants of the right to arrange a ward's marriage appear as royal grants.
— Feudal tenure treatises, including Glanvill and Bracton, which address the lord's right of marriage (maritagium) over tenants in chief.
The term does not survive into modern legal usage. Any appearance of maritare in sources post-dating the abolition of feudal tenures in England (1660, Tenures Abolition Act) is either antiquarian quotation or scholarly commentary on historical law.
The principal research trap is conflation with the noun form maritagium, which traveled further into legal usage and appears in equity cases involving marriage settlements well into the eighteenth century. A search keyed to maritare will not surface maritagium results, and vice versa — researchers interested in the full feudal marriage complex must run both terms.
Jurisdictional note: Maritare as a term of legal force is specific to English feudal law and its Scottish and Irish analogues. Continental civil law systems used the term and its cognates in canon law contexts, where meaning could shift toward ecclesiastical consent to marriage rather than feudal proprietary right. Cross-jurisdictional comparison requires care.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the foundational entry for this term in the Law Mind corpus, defining maritare simply as "to marry" and anchoring it to Magna Carta, chapter 7, and the broader feudal marriage system. Burrill does not elaborate on the doctrinal content — the entry is a signal to the reader that the term exists and where to find it, rather than a treatise on its meaning.
What Burrill's entry omits is notable: it does not distinguish maritare (the act) from maritagium (the right or portion), nor does it engage with the tension in Magna Carta between the Crown's claimed right to arrange marriages of wards and the charter's protective provisions for widows. Researchers relying on Burrill alone will have the Latin confirmed but will lack the doctrinal framework needed to interpret it in context.
No entry for maritare appears in Black's Law Dictionary in its standard historical editions, which reflects the term's disappearance from living legal practice by the time those dictionaries were compiled. Its presence in Burrill — a dictionary oriented toward historical and Latin legal vocabulary — is the appropriate archival home for the term.