Definition
A Latin legal term from medieval English law meaning to plead, or more broadly, to litigate. Placitare encompasses two related but distinct procedural senses: (1) the act of formally pleading before a court — stating a party's position in the prescribed form of law — and (2) the act of impleading or prosecuting another, meaning to make a matter the subject of a plea or legal action. The conjugated forms appear frequently in Year Books and early plea rolls: placitavit (he pleaded), placitantur (pleas are pleaded).
The term is a verb form derived from placitum, the noun denoting a plea, pleading, or court proceeding in medieval Latin legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, and Bracton-era materials — will encounter placitare and its conjugated forms without gloss or translation. The term's two senses (to plead formally, and to implead or bring suit) can appear in close proximity and must be distinguished by context: the first is a procedural act within existing litigation; the second is the act of initiating or implicating a party in litigation.
The compressed Latin of plea rolls frequently drops the subject, leaving only forms like placitavit or placitantur. Researchers should recognize these as standard verbal shorthand rather than indicators of an unusual legal event. The Year Book citations in Burrill (M. 1 Edw. II) place the term firmly in the early fourteenth century, but the underlying concept runs through Bracton and beyond.
Placitare connects directly to the broader placitum family of terms, which is essential infrastructure in any research involving medieval pleading, court rolls, or early common law procedure. Misreading placitare as a noun (confusing it with placitum) is a common transcription error. The -are ending signals the infinitive verb form; the -um ending signals the noun.
No modern procedural equivalent exists as a term of art, which means placitare drops out of legal literature almost entirely after the latinized Year Book period. Researchers should not expect to find it in post-seventeenth-century sources except in historical commentary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill agree on the core meaning — to plead — but Burrill provides the more useful entry for research purposes. Burrill's expansion into the secondary sense (to litigate, to implead, to prosecute) and his citations to Bracton and Hale's History of the Common Law give the term its full procedural range. Black's entry, condensed to two words, is adequate for quick identification but insufficient for understanding how the term functions in source documents.
Burrill's citation to Bracton (fol. 106) connects placitare to the formal pleading system described in De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, one of the foundational treatises on early common law procedure. The reference to Hale's History of the Common Law contextualizes the secondary sense — impleading — within the broader history of English writ practice. Neither dictionary notes the term's absence from post-medieval legal writing, which researchers should treat as implicit: placitare is a term of the Latin legal record, not of the vernacular common law tradition that succeeded it.