Definition
A Latin term from the old common law of pleading denoting the plaintiff's formal statement of facts upon which the action is grounded — what modern practice calls the declaration or count. The narratio was the foundational pleading document by which the plaintiff narrated, in prescribed form, the circumstances giving rise to the claim. It is the ancestor of the modern complaint.
The term appears in historical sources primarily in two related but distinct uses: (1) as a synonym for the entire declaration — the plaintiff's opening pleading in a common law action; and (2) as a synonym for a single count within that declaration, where multiple grounds of action were pleaded together.
The abbreviations narr. and nar. appear frequently in older legal authorities and reports as shorthand for the term.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "narratio" is not a standard entry in modern English dictionaries; it is recognized as a Latin noun meaning a narration, account, or story.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an independent entry; the root "narration" is defined as the act of telling or recounting a series of events; a narrative.
The gap between the ordinary Latin sense and the legal term is significant. In common Latin usage, narratio simply means any account or story. In common law pleading, it acquired a precise technical meaning: a formal, structured document governed by strict pleading rules, capable of being challenged by demurrer or special plea, and determinative of the scope of the plaintiff's action. A researcher encountering the term in a legal source should not read it as merely descriptive storytelling — it is a term of art with procedural consequences.
Common Confusion
Narratio is sometimes used interchangeably with count and declaration in historical sources, and the three terms do not always map cleanly onto one another. Declaration typically refers to the complete pleading instrument; count refers to a single ground of action within that instrument. Narratio appears in historical texts as a synonym for either, depending on context and era. In the earliest common law practice, when the plaintiff's statement was delivered orally before the court, the English equivalent was tale — a word that captures the literal Latin meaning of narratio and is also the etymological origin of count (from the French conte, a telling). Researchers should not assume that every use of narratio means the whole declaration; context determines whether the writer means the full pleading or one count within it.
Why It Matters in Research
Narratio is primarily a term of historical and comparative legal research. It does not appear in modern procedural codes, which replaced common law pleading with notice pleading under instruments such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. A researcher will encounter it in:
— Medieval and early modern English legal sources, particularly treatises and plea rolls from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries.
— American and English common law pleading manuals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it appears as a technical synonym for declaration or count.
— Annotations and digests from the same period, where narr. or nar. as an abbreviation may be easy to overlook or misread.
The key navigational trap is the abbreviation. In older reporters and digests, narr. may appear in marginal notes or headnotes without explanation. Researchers unfamiliar with the term may read it as a general descriptive note rather than a specific pleading reference.
The term also signals the procedural era of the source. Sources using narratio without explanation are almost certainly pre-code — written before the mid-nineteenth century reforms (the Field Code in the United States, the Common Law Procedure Acts in England) that abolished formal common law pleading. Encountering narratio in a source therefore tells a researcher something about the procedural world the source inhabits, which bears on how the substantive rules discussed in that source should be applied or distinguished.
The reference in Burrill to oral delivery — anciently delivered ore tenus — is historically significant. Early common law pleading was an oral exchange before the court; the narratio was spoken, not filed. The transition to written pleading is a major development in procedural history, and sources from different periods of this transition use the term differently.
Historical Dictionary Support
The six source dictionaries present a consistent and largely convergent account. All identify narratio as a Latin common law term for the plaintiff's count or declaration. There is no meaningful disagreement among them on core meaning.
The sources differ in depth. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier give brief, functional definitions that adequately serve a practitioner needing quick identification. Rapalje & Lawrence reduce it to a bare equivalence — count; declaration — which is accurate but offers no context. Anderson adds the useful practical note about the abbreviation (narr., nar.) and identifies narrator as the agent noun for one who files a declaration, a usage rarely noted elsewhere.
Burrill is the most instructive of the historical sources. It anchors the term in specific medieval authorities — Bracton, Fleta, Reeves' History of English Law, and Blackstone's Commentaries — and supplies the connection to the English word tale and the oral origins of pleading. This is the entry most useful to a researcher working in primary medieval sources, as it provides the documentary trail. The reference to Bracton at folio 283b–284 and Fleta book 6, chapters 16–20 gives entry points into the foundational common law pleading literature.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any discussion of the formal requirements of a valid narratio — the certainty rules, the necessity of alleging time and place, the rules governing departure and amendment — all of which are essential to understanding how the term functioned in actual litigation. For that level of detail, a researcher must move from these dictionaries to treatises on common law pleading, such as Stephen on Pleading or Chitty's Treatise on Pleading.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pleading (Common Law); Declaration (Pleading)