Definition
PURPARLER is an archaic Law French term meaning to speak about, confer, or consult. In legal contexts it appears primarily in older pleading formulas and chronicle sources, most notably in the negative phrase ne compassay ne purparlay — "neither compassed nor consulted about" — used to deny participation in a plot or conspiracy. The term carries no independent substantive legal doctrine but functions as a verbal element in formal denials of confederacy or complicity.
Burrill's entry also records two closely related terms sharing the same root and appearing in the same cluster of archaic land law vocabulary:
PURPARS (also Perpars): In old records, the share of an estate following partition. Effectively a synonym for purparty in Latin record form.
PURPARTY (also Purpartie): The substantive term of the group. A share or portion allotted to a co-heir or coparcener upon division of an inheritance. Where land held by coparceners is divided, each co-heir's allocated portion is her purparty. This is the term most likely to appear in operative legal instruments and is the anchor concept for the entire lexical cluster.
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Common Confusion
Researchers may encounter PURPARLER, PURPARS, and PURPARTY in close proximity in old records and mistake them for variants of a single term with a single meaning. They are related but distinct: purparler is a verb-derived term about speech and consultation; purpars and purparty are noun forms denoting a share of divided property. The conspiracy-denial formula (ne compassay ne purparlay) has nothing to do with partition of land. Burrill himself clusters them together by alphabetical accident, not by conceptual unity, and this adjacency in dictionary sources has contributed to the confusion.
PURPARTY should also not be confused with MOIETY, which refers to a half-share specifically, whereas purparty denotes any allocated portion regardless of size.
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Why It Matters in Research
Purparler in its verbal, conspiracy-denial sense is a relic of Law French pleading. Researchers working in medieval criminal records, treason proceedings, or early common law indictments will encounter the ne compassay ne purparlay formula and need to recognize it as a standard denial of confederacy rather than a term of art with evolving doctrine. It does not appear in modern pleading.
Purparty, by contrast, has a longer research tail. It surfaces in coparcenary and partition disputes running from the medieval period well into the early modern era, and understanding it is necessary for tracing inheritance of land through female lines, where estates frequently descended to multiple daughters dividing as coparceners rather than to a single male heir. Law French records of partition proceedings will use purparty where later English records use share or allotment. Researchers should expect spelling variation: purpartie, pourpartie, propars, perpars, and pro diviso all appear as equivalents in different source traditions.
The Latin equivalent pro diviso (as divided) noted by Burrill is useful for cross-referencing Latin record sources against Law French ones covering the same transaction.
One navigational trap: Cowell's Interpreter and similar early modern legal dictionaries treat purparty in their own entries, sometimes with slightly different emphases on the coparcenary context. Burrill's cross-reference to Propars signals that variant spellings are spread across dictionary sources in ways that can fragment what is effectively one concept.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal source here and covers the full cluster efficiently. The entry for purparler itself is spare — little more than the translation and the Britton citation — because the term's legal function is almost entirely formulaic. The substantive weight of the entry is carried by purparty, which Burrill defines cleanly as a share after division and supports with references to Parochial Antiquities and Cowell.
What the historical dictionary record does not provide is any treatment of how purparty operated procedurally in partition actions — the mechanics by which coparceners actually obtained their respective shares, the role of the writ of partition, or the courts in which such proceedings ran. For that procedural context, researchers must move to treatises on real property and the writ system rather than relying on dictionary sources alone.
The Britton citation (c. 22) in the purparler entry is a genuine reference to the late thirteenth-century legal treatise Britton, one of the foundational texts of early English common law, lending the formula authentic medieval authority.
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Jurisdictional Note
Purparty as a concept belongs to the English common law of coparcenary and partition. American jurisdictions inherited the vocabulary but largely replaced it with statutory partition terminology by the nineteenth century. Researchers in early American colonial land records may still encounter the term, particularly in jurisdictions with strong English conveyancing traditions.
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