Definition
In civil (Roman) law, rapina denotes the violent taking of money or goods from another person for the sake of gain. It was a specific delict under Roman law, distinguished from ordinary theft (furtum) by the element of open force. Roman jurists treated rapina as an aggravated form of furtum, and the praetorian action for rapina (actio vi bonorum raptorum) allowed the victim to recover fourfold the value of the goods taken.
In old English law, rapina carried the equivalent meaning of open and violent larceny from the person — what modern law would recognize as robbery. The term appears in early English statutes and common law commentary in this sense.
Common Confusion
Rapina is closely related to, but formally distinct from, furtum (theft) in Roman law. Furtum encompassed a broad range of dishonest takings, including those accomplished secretly or by stealth. Rapina required open violence. The distinction matters in historical legal sources because the remedies differed: the actio furti and the actio vi bonorum raptorum were separate actions with different measures of damages. Researchers reading civil law texts must not treat rapina as a synonym for furtum, even though both involved the wrongful taking of property.
Why It Matters in Research
Rapina is a term of Roman and early English law with no direct modern statutory counterpart. Researchers encounter it primarily in three contexts: (1) civil law treatises and digests discussing the Roman law of delict; (2) early English statutes and common law commentaries, particularly pre-18th-century sources; and (3) comparative law scholarship tracing the lineage of modern robbery doctrine.
The key research trap is anachronism. When a 17th-century English source uses rapina, it is reaching for the Roman concept to describe what the author understands as aggravated violent theft. This does not mean the Roman law structure — including the fourfold damages remedy — applies in the English context. The term was borrowed descriptively, not as a wholesale adoption of Roman doctrine.
Burrill cites Stat. 14 Car. II. c. 22 and Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Com. 242) in the English law context, and Hallifax's Analysis of the Civil Law and Heineccius's Elementa Juris Civilis in the Roman law context. Researchers consulting Blackstone or Hallifax on robbery will find rapina used as a term of art anchoring English practice in Roman antecedents. This is stylistic and organizational, not a claim that English robbery law derived its rules directly from the actio vi bonorum raptorum.
For corpus researchers, rapina functions as a gateway term: finding it in a source signals that the author is operating within a civil law framework or is self-consciously situating English law within a broader jurisprudential tradition. It rarely appears in purely common law pleading records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry efficiently captures both dimensions of the term. On the Roman law side, Burrill draws on Hallifax and Heineccius — standard 18th- and 19th-century civil law reference authorities — to establish the core definition: violent taking from the person for gain. On the English law side, Burrill anchors the term in Blackstone and a Carolingian-era statute, confirming that early English legal writers used rapina to describe robbery as a recognized category of aggravated theft.
What Burrill does not address, and what researchers should supply from other sources, is the procedural architecture of the Roman actio vi bonorum raptorum — the specific praetorian origins, the one-year limitation period for the quadruple damages remedy, and the relationship between rapina liability and the broader Roman law of obligations. These details, available in the Digest and in Gaius's Institutes, are essential for anyone doing substantive Roman law research rather than merely tracing terminology.
Burrill's entry also omits any discussion of how English law ultimately displaced rapina with the statutory and common law vocabulary of robbery, larceny, and assault — a transition largely complete by the 18th century.
Jurisdictional Note
Rapina as a live legal term is confined to Roman law and early English common law sources. It does not appear as operative terminology in any modern common law jurisdiction. Civil law jurisdictions whose private law descends from Roman sources may retain doctrinal concepts traceable to rapina, but the Latin term itself is not used in modern statutory codes.