Definition
Ordine is a Law French term meaning a rule, order, or regulation. It appears in medieval and early modern legal texts as a general term for an authoritative directive or formal enactment — a command issued by a person or body with recognized legal authority. The related form ordiner (also ordyner) means to ordain or to establish by order, carrying the sense of formal promulgation.
The term is not a term of art in modern Anglo-American law. Its significance is primarily textual: researchers encounter it in translated or transcribed medieval sources, Year Books, Bracton-era materials, and early treatises where Law French served as the working language of English legal practice.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of ordine is recognition. A reader working through early English legal manuscripts, printed editions of Bracton, Britton, or Fleta, or collections of medieval statutes may encounter ordine or ordiner without context identifying them as Law French equivalents of "order" or "ordain." Misreading the term, or conflating it with Latin ordinem or ordinis (the accusative and genitive of ordo, meaning rank, sequence, or class), can produce translation errors that distort the legal meaning of a passage.
Two specific traps arise in historical sources. First, Law French and Latin were used interchangeably and sometimes mixed within the same document; ordine can appear in a Latin text as a borrowed French form rather than as the Latin ablative of ordo. Context usually clarifies which is intended, but not always. Second, ordiner as a verb shares a root with the ecclesiastical and civil law concept of ordination — the formal conferral of clerical status — which carries an entirely different legal freight. A clause ordaining a rule is not the same as a clause ordaining a priest, and early sources do not always signal the distinction.
For researchers tracing the development of regulatory and administrative authority in English law, ordine belongs to a cluster of Law French terms — alongside ordinance, arrêt, and assize — that mark the gradual formalization of rule-making power. The transition from ordine in manuscript sources to ordinance in printed statutory compilations tracks an important shift in how regulatory authority was conceptualized and recorded.
Corpus connections: researchers following ordine into modern doctrine will find themselves working with ordinance as the natural successor term, and from there into the substantial modern literature on local government regulatory power, preemption, and the constitutional limits of municipal lawmaking.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term and provides a minimal but accurate entry: "A rule or order; a regulation," citing Kelham's glossary of Norman and Old French words used in English law. Burrill also notes the related verb ordiner/ordyner with a citation to Britton, one of the principal early English law treatises written in Law French.
Burrill's brevity here is appropriate to the term's function as a term of translation rather than a term of substance. The entry does not attempt to define a legal doctrine; it identifies a word a reader will encounter in a specific class of sources. What Burrill does not address is the potential for confusion with the Latin ordo family of terms, nor does he trace the term's relationship to the English "ordinance" as it developed in statutory and municipal law. Researchers should not expect Burrill alone to carry them from this historical term into its modern applications.
Kelham's glossary, referenced by Burrill, remains a useful primary reference for Law French vocabulary in English legal sources, though it is not a doctrinal work and should be used as a finding aid rather than an authority.