Definition
In historical common law practice, *narrare* (Latin: "to narrate" or "to tell") refers to the act of formally stating a plaintiff's case before a court. To narrare was to count — that is, to lay out the plaintiff's claim in the prescribed oral or written form that initiated a common law action. The product of this act was the narratio, also called the count or declaration, which served as the foundational pleading in an action at law.
The term belongs to the technical vocabulary of medieval and early modern English practice, when Latin remained the language of legal record. It captures the moment at which pleading shifted from informal grievance to formal legal demand: the plaintiff, through counsel (the narrator or serjeant), would narrate the facts and legal basis of the claim in the structured form the court required.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter *narrare* almost exclusively in Year Book materials and early common law treatises predating the formalization of English pleading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term is not found in modern practice materials and will not appear in post-Hilary Term Rules sources (post-1834) in any operative sense.
Two navigational points matter most:
First, *narrare* is the verbal root of a cluster of related terms — narratio, narrator, narraverit — that appear throughout Year Book and early plea roll records. Recognizing the root unlocks the family of terms. A researcher who encounters *narrando* (the gerund form, meaning "by counting" or "in counting") or *ad narrandum* ("to count") in old records is seeing the same concept in grammatical variation.
Second, the procedural moment *narrare* describes — the formal statement of the plaintiff's case — evolved substantially over centuries. What began as an oral act performed by a serjeant at the bar became, through the formalization of pleading, the written declaration. The word *narrare* anchors researchers to the earlier, oral phase of this development. When Burrill cites *Yearb. M.1 Edw. II* (Michaelmas Term, 1 Edward II, circa 1307–1308), he is pointing to a source in which pleading was still primarily an oral, dialogic exchange. Researchers working in that period must understand *narrare* as an act of speaking before the court, not filing a document.
The term also connects directly to the office of the narrator — the forerunner of the modern barrister — whose function was precisely to perform the narrare on the client's behalf. Corpus materials touching on the serjeants-at-law and the early English bar will intersect here.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise: *narrare* means "to relate or narrate; to state a plaintiff's case; to count; to declare," with *narrando* glossed as "counting." The citation to *Yearb. M.1 Edw. II* is the entry's primary historical anchor and is one of the earliest Year Book terms.
Burrill correctly identifies *narrare* as belonging to "old practice," signaling to readers that the term is not operative in the law contemporary to his writing (mid-nineteenth century). What his entry does not supply is the procedural architecture around the term: the relationship between *narrare* and the count, the count and the declaration, or the shift from oral to written pleading that made the term archaic. Researchers should supplement Burrill with sources on Year Book pleading practice — Maitland's work on the forms of action and the introductory volumes of the Selden Society's Year Book series provide the context Burrill omits.
No other shelf sources in the current Law Mind corpus cover *narrare* directly. The term's absence from later dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's) confirms its status as a purely historical term of art, obsolete well before American legal practice took its modern form.
Jurisdictional Note
*Narrare* is exclusively a term of English common law origin. It has no independent life in civil law or equity practice, and American legal materials employ it only when directly quoting or translating early English precedent. Researchers working in civilian jurisdictions will not encounter it as a functional term.