Definition
A Latin and Law Latin verb used in medieval and early English legal texts meaning: (1) to ordain or establish, especially in the context of royal legislative authority — as when a king formally establishes a law or statute; (2) to appoint or constitute, particularly in testamentary contexts where a testator designates an executor. The term appears in its conjugated forms throughout early English legal records: *ordinavit* (he ordained), *ordinatum* (ordained), and the phrase *ordino et constituo* (I ordain and constitute), which was a standard testamentary formula.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To ordain means to make someone a priest or minister, or to officially order or decree something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To invest with ministerial or sacerdotal functions; to introduce into the office of the Christian ministry; also, to decree; to establish; to appoint."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is primarily one of register and context. The ecclesiastical sense of ordaining a priest is familiar to modern readers; the legal sense — ordaining a statute or constituting an executor — draws on the same root authority but operates in a purely temporal and documentary frame. A researcher encountering *ordinare* in a medieval English legal record should not assume any ecclesiastical context unless the surrounding text supports it.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Burrill or in primary sources referencing early English statutes will encounter *ordinare* and its conjugated forms in two distinct but overlapping contexts: legislative recitals and testamentary boilerplate. Conflating these contexts is an easy error.
In the legislative context, *ordinavit* or *ordinatum est* typically appears in the preamble or recital of a statute, attributing the act of lawmaking to royal authority. Burrill's reference to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 64, § 2) places *ordinavit* in the recital of the Statute of Acton Burnel (1283), a commercial statute concerning debt recovery. The reference to *ordinatum* in the Statute of Marlbridge (1267) (Fleta, lib. 2, c. 47, § 13) follows the same pattern. Researchers using Fleta as a secondary source for statutory interpretation should note that Fleta paraphrases rather than reproduces statutes verbatim; the verb forms Burrill cites appear in Fleta's narrative, not necessarily in the official statutory text.
In the testamentary context, the formula *ordino et constituo talem executorem meum* (I ordain and constitute such a one my executor) is a recognizable fixture of medieval and early modern English wills. Researchers transcribing or abstracting probate records from this period should flag this phrase as the executor-appointment clause; its presence is legally operative, not merely ceremonial.
More broadly, *ordinare* belongs to a family of Latin verbs — alongside *statuere*, *constituere*, *decernere*, and *disponere* — used in early legal instruments to signal authoritative acts of establishment or appointment. Distinguishing these terms matters when parsing the exact legal force a drafter intended. *Ordinare* tends to carry stronger connotations of formal establishment from authority, whereas *disponere* leans toward arrangement or disposition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the only Law Mind shelf source treating *ordinare*, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill identifies the two core uses — legislative and testamentary — and grounds both in specific references to Fleta. The Fleta citations are useful anchors but require context: Fleta is a late-thirteenth-century English legal treatise written by an unknown author, drawing heavily on Bracton and on contemporaneous legislation. It is a reliable guide to legal usage of the period but not a substitute for primary statutory sources.
Burrill does not address *ordinare* in its ecclesiastical or canonical dimensions, which is appropriate for a common law dictionary but leaves a gap for researchers working on ecclesiastical court records or canon law materials, where the verb carries additional freight related to clerical appointment and sacramental authority.
No broader synthesis across shelf sources is possible here, as Burrill alone covers the term. Researchers needing fuller treatment of the legislative context should consult Bracton's *De Legibus* and the printed editions of the Statutes of the Realm; for testamentary usage, the standard formularies and probate manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the most useful resources.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Ordinare* is an archaic term of medieval English law and canon law practice. Its use in primary sources is effectively confined to records predating the widespread adoption of English as the language of legal instruments — roughly pre-1500 for statutes and pre-1700 for many probate documents. No current common law jurisdiction uses the term as operative legal language.
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