Definition
A Latin term of medieval English legal usage meaning "to pardon." Appearing in the inflected forms *pardonare* (to pardon) and *pardonavit* (he pardoned), the term is not a substantive legal concept in its own right but a Latin verbal form found in old English legal records, pleadings, and treatises where a formal grant of pardon is recorded or described. It signals the act by which a sovereign or authorized authority formally remitted a penalty, offense, or forfeiture against a named individual.
The term belongs to the Law Latin vocabulary that dominated English legal instruments from the Norman period through the early modern era. It would appear in writs, court rolls, and formal instruments recording acts of royal clemency.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term has no current common English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term does not appear in Webster's 1913 as an English word.
The underlying English verb "to pardon" carries a general sense of forgiveness in ordinary speech — forgiving an insult, excusing a minor social transgression — that is far weaker than the technical legal meaning embedded in *pardonare*. The legal act recorded by this Latin form was a formal sovereign act with enforceable legal consequences: it extinguished punishment, restored civil rights, and was recorded in official instruments. The colloquial English sense conveys none of that operative legal weight.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *pardonare* or *pardonavit* in primary sources are almost certainly working with pre-modern English legal instruments — writs, plea rolls, patent rolls, or treatises such as Fleta — where Law Latin was the operative documentary language. The term is a marker of period and genre: its presence identifies a text as English law from roughly the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries.
The principal research trap is treating *pardonare* as a term of art with technical content distinct from the English law of pardon. It is not. The word is the Latin vehicle for recording what English law understood as a pardon; the substantive doctrine lives in the English-language sources on executive clemency and royal prerogative. A researcher who indexes *pardonare* without connecting it to the broader pardon doctrine will miss the legal substance entirely.
A secondary trap involves the corrupted Burrill entry. The historical dictionary entry as preserved runs together two separate matters — the definition of *pardonare* and material about peers sitting in the king's courts to try fellow tenants (citing 2 Blackstone's Commentaries 54 and Spelman). This appears to be a typographical or binding corruption in the source, not a substantive connection between *pardonare* and the law of peers. Researchers relying on Burrill should not infer any doctrinal link between the pardon concept and the peers-as-jurors material that follows in the entry.
Fleta, cited by Burrill at lib. 1, c. 28, §§ 1, 2, is a thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise of English origin. Its use of *pardonare* and *pardonavit* is representative of how such terms functioned in the treatise literature of the period — descriptive of sovereign acts rather than constitutive of a defined legal element.
For corpus researchers, encountering this term is a reliable signal to branch outward: check the surrounding instrument for the grantee, the offense remitted, and the issuing authority. The term itself says only that a pardon was granted; the research value lies in what the surrounding record reveals about the nature and scope of that grant.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. It is brief and accurate in its core content: *pardonare* means "to pardon" in old English law, and *pardonavit* is the past-tense form meaning "he pardoned," both attested in Fleta.
The entry is notably compromised by what appears to be extraneous text — the material on barons sitting as peers in the king's courts, referencing Blackstone and Spelman — which does not belong to a definition of *pardonare* and likely reflects a compositor or transcription error in the printed dictionary. Historical dictionaries of this type were assembled under significant production pressure, and such intrusions are not uncommon. Researchers should treat the peers material as inapplicable to this term.
No other shelf source addresses *pardonare* directly. The term's absence from later legal dictionaries reflects its status as a dead Law Latin form superseded entirely by English legal vocabulary once Law Latin was abolished in English courts by statute in the eighteenth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Pardonare* is a term of historical English law only. It has no operative meaning in any modern common law jurisdiction. Researchers working in American legal history may encounter analogous Latin forms in colonial-era records that drew on English legal drafting practice, but the term carries no independent American legal significance.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Pardon; Executive Clemency; Law Latin; Royal Prerogative
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