Definition
In old Latin legal practice, to trouble, molest, vex, or harass a person by means of litigation or legal process. The term appears in medieval and early English legal texts to describe conduct that amounted to the wrongful use of legal proceedings as a form of harassment, rather than a good-faith pursuit of a legal claim.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard English entry. The term is Latin and has no recognized common English meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. Webster's does not carry this term.
Because occasionare is pure medieval Latin legal vocabulary with no common English counterpart, the gap between legal and ordinary meaning is not separately analyzed here. The term belongs entirely to the technical vocabulary of old Latin practice records and does not survive in modern legal usage.
Common Confusion
Occasionare is sometimes loosely grouped with the concept of maintenance or champerty, both of which also address the misuse of legal process. The distinction is meaningful: maintenance and champerty concern improper support of another party's suit, while occasionare describes the wrongful harassment of a person through litigation — the conduct is directed at a victim, not arranged in favor of a litigant. Researchers should also take care not to conflate occasionare with vexatious litigation as a modern doctrine; the medieval Latin term describes the act of harassment through process, not the formal legal cause of action that vexatious litigation has become under modern common law and civil procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Occasionare surfaces almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal instruments — charters, plea rolls, and texts of the Fleta tradition — and will be encountered by researchers working in Latin ecclesiastical records, royal charters, or early English common law sources predating the systematic use of English in legal documents. Several practical research points apply:
First, the term's appearance in a document is a signal about the nature of the proceeding or the protection being granted. Charters of confirmation and franchises frequently employed clausulae prohibiting officeholders or lords from occasioning tenants, meaning the word functions as a term of art in protective grants, not merely a narrative description of conduct.
Second, researchers using Fleta or Spelman as secondary authorities should note that these sources use occasionare in a specific procedural register tied to the restraint of royal officers and local magnates from harassing those holding royal grants. The term is therefore relevant not only to litigation history but to the history of royal franchise and administrative control.
Third, because the term is Latin and confined to a narrow documentary tradition, it will not appear in English-language abridgments or digests of the common law. Researchers who encounter it in source documents and attempt to trace it through Coke, Blackstone, or modern legal dictionaries will find little or nothing. Burrill is one of the very few English-language legal dictionaries to carry it at all, and even Burrill's treatment is brief.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary English-language dictionary treatment: "L. Lat. In old practice. To trouble or molest; to vex or harass with litigation," with references to Spelman, Fleta lib. 2, c. 66, § 20, and Cart. Conf. 49 Hen. Burrill's citation chain is characteristically thin but points researchers toward two distinct source types: Spelman's Glossarium (a specialized glossary of Latin legal and archaic terms) and Fleta, the thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in the tradition of Bracton. The Carta Confirmationis reference (49 Hen. III) anchors the term in a specific documentary corpus of royal confirmations.
No other standard historical legal dictionary in wide use — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin — carries occasionare. This is consistent with the term's strictly medieval and Latinate character. Spelman's Glossarium remains the deepest single-source treatment for researchers who need more than Burrill provides.
The historical sources do not disagree on meaning; they are simply sparse. What the dictionaries collectively miss is the functional context: occasionare in charters was not merely descriptive but operative, appearing in prohibitory clauses that gave recipients enforceable protection against harassment by named classes of persons.
Jurisdictional Note
Occasionare is specific to the English and Anglo-Norman legal tradition as mediated through Latin documentary practice. It has no recognized equivalent in Scots law, canon law dictionaries, or continental civil law sources under this term, though functionally analogous prohibitions exist in all of those traditions under different vocabulary.