Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "treasonably" or "in a treasonous manner." In English and American legal practice, proditorie appeared as a formal term of art in criminal indictments for treason during the period when such documents were drafted in Latin. Its function was adverbial: it characterized the alleged act as having been committed treasonously, in the same way that felonice ("feloniously") or murdravit ("did murder") served as technical words of art in their respective charges. The presence of proditorie in an indictment was not merely descriptive — it carried formal legal weight, and its omission or misspelling could potentially defeat the charge on technical grounds.
Common Confusion
Proditorie should not be confused with the substantive Latin terms for the crime itself, such as proditio (treason as a noun) or proditor (a traitor). Proditorie is strictly adverbial and procedural — it describes how an act was done, not what the act was or who committed it. Researchers encountering Latin indictments should also distinguish proditorie from perduellio, an older Roman-law term for a form of treason that appears in learned treatises but was never standard English pleading vocabulary.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a pre-modern pleading artifact. English courts conducted proceedings and drafted indictments in Latin until the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731 (4 Geo. 2, c. 26) required the use of English in legal records. After that statute took effect, proditorie disappeared from active pleading practice, replaced by its English equivalent "traitorously." Researchers working with English treason indictments predating 1731, or with colonial American records that followed English Latin-pleading conventions, will encounter this term as a fixed formula. Its presence signals that the charge is for treason (as opposed to felony or misdemeanor), which has significant downstream implications: treason carried distinct procedural rules, evidentiary requirements, and penalties from ordinary felonies, including historically the requirement of two witnesses to the overt act.
Because the term survived into American usage through inherited English common-law pleading forms, it may appear in early colonial and post-independence records before American courts fully transitioned to English-language practice. Researchers should not assume that the absence of proditorie in an early American indictment means the charge was not for treason — jurisdictions varied in how quickly they abandoned Latin forms.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notable for what it does not say: the dictionary provides only the bare definition "treasonably" before pivoting to unrelated headwords (produce broker, produce of a farm, etc.), offering no contextual guidance on pleading usage. This reflects the term's obsolescence by the time of that dictionary's compilation (1883) and means researchers relying solely on Rapalje will lack the pleading context necessary to interpret historical documents correctly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) gives an identical definition: "Treasonably. This is a technical word formerly used in indictments for treason, when they were written in Latin," citing Tomlins' Law Dictionary. The word "formerly" in both editions confirms that by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when Black's was compiled, proditorie was understood as a historical relic with no active pleading life. The citation to Tomlins (Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, A Legal and Commercial Dictionary, 1809) situates the term's authoritative treatment in early nineteenth-century English lexicography, before American legal dictionaries had developed their own independent traditions. All three source dictionaries agree on the definition and on the term's obsolete status; none diverges in a meaningful way. The historical sources collectively provide no guidance on the consequences of omitting the term from a Latin indictment — a gap that researchers must fill from treatises on criminal pleading (such as Chitty's Criminal Law) rather than from the dictionary literature.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Treason — Historical Pleading Requirements; Latin in Legal Proceedings