Definition
A Latin term from old English legal practice meaning "to bear" or "to bring." In medieval and early modern procedure, portare was used in phrases describing the initiation or carrying forward of legal proceedings. The most common formulation was portare assisam — to bring an assize — referring to the act of commencing that form of action before a court. The term belongs to the procedural vocabulary of medieval common law and does not carry substantive legal meaning independent of the phrases in which it appears.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Portare is a Latin verb meaning "to carry" or "to bear," still familiar to English speakers through derivatives such as "porter," "portable," and "transport."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the root concept of carrying or bearing physical objects was understood through English derivatives.
The gap here is directional: in common Latin usage, portare typically denotes the physical carrying of objects. In legal Latin, it was extended metaphorically to the carrying or bringing of legal actions — the initiation of a proceeding, not the movement of a thing. A researcher encountering portare in a medieval legal manuscript should look first for a procedural context, not a physical one.
Why It Matters in Research
Portare appears almost exclusively in highly technical medieval Latin legal texts and in the commentators and treatises that drew on Bracton and similar authorities. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note several points:
First, the term surfaces in texts concerning the assize system — portare assisam being the canonical phrase — so it is a marker for material dealing with real property actions and early common law procedure. Encountering portare in a manuscript or treatise is a reliable signal that the surrounding text concerns the mechanics of bringing a particular form of action, not the substantive law of the claim itself.
Second, the figurative use Burrill flags — that "bring an action" is the modern descendant of portare — is worth tracking across historical sources. Researchers tracing the evolution of procedural language from Latin formularies to early modern and then contemporary English practice will find portare a useful anchor point. The phrase "bring an action" is now so settled in English legal idiom that its Latin root is invisible; portare makes the genealogy visible.
Third, portare appears in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, the foundational thirteenth-century treatise on English common law. Any researcher working with Bracton's text or with secondary scholarship on Bractonian procedure should expect to encounter portare and cognate forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential account: portare is Old English legal Latin, defined functionally by its procedural use rather than by abstraction. Burrill's reference to Bracton (folio 177) situates the term precisely within the Bractonian procedural tradition and confirms that portare assisam — bringing an assize — was its primary application.
Burrill also draws the connection between portare and the modern phrase "bring an action" explicitly, characterizing the figurative use as an everyday survival of the older Latin idiom. This is an unusually direct chain of influence that Burrill credits without qualification.
Older historical dictionaries in the civil and canon law traditions may address portare in the context of Roman law (where it also appears), but in the common law context the term is tightly bounded by Bracton-era procedure and its immediate successors. Researchers should not assume that portare in a Roman law source carries identical procedural connotations.