Definition
A Latin term meaning "he ravished" or "she ravished." In old English criminal law, *rapuit* was the operative technical word appearing in indictments for rape. The term served as the verbal core of the charging language, functioning in Latin pleadings the way the English word "ravished" functioned in later vernacular indictments. Its presence in a formal accusation was not incidental — it was the word upon which the legal sufficiency of the charge depended.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern English criminal records — plea rolls, assize records, or early printed case reports — will encounter *rapuit* as the pivot word in rape indictments drafted in Law Latin. Its significance is procedural as much as substantive: courts treated the presence or absence of this precise term as determinative of whether an indictment was legally sufficient. Substituting a synonym, even one semantically equivalent, could be fatal to the charge.
This creates a specific research trap. When reading historical indictments or case summaries from the era of Law Latin pleading, a document that appears to charge a lesser or different offense may in fact be a rape prosecution — or vice versa — depending on whether *rapuit* appears. Researchers should not assume that the presence of related Latin terms (such as *vi et armis* or *felonice*) substitutes for *rapuit* in this context.
The term also anchors the broader historical vocabulary of sexual offenses in English law. Because the law of rape was slow to develop and unevenly applied, the precise language of indictments carries documentary weight that later statutory language tends to obscure. Corpus researchers connecting early case law to the development of rape as a common law felony will need to track *rapuit* as a term of art across plea rolls and printed reports, including in works like East's *Pleas of the Crown* (2 East, 30), which the historical dictionaries cite directly.
The First Edition of Black's contains a corrupted entry — the text shifts mid-sentence into a definition of *ransom*, suggesting a typesetting or editorial error in the original. Researchers relying on the First Edition for this entry should disregard the ransom material and consult the Second Edition or Burrill for the accurate definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: *rapuit* is a Latin term meaning "ravished," functioning as a technical word in old English indictments for rape. Black's Second Edition and Burrill are the reliable sources here; both cite 2 East, 30 as authority, and Burrill additionally cites Wharton's American Criminal Law. The entries are brief and consistent, reflecting the term's narrow, well-settled function.
Black's First Edition entry is unreliable for this term due to an apparent printing error that embeds ransom-related text within the *rapuit* entry. This is an instructive reminder that early editions of Black's, while valuable, require cross-checking against parallel sources when the entry text appears inconsistent or incomplete.
None of the historical dictionaries address the consequences of omitting *rapuit* from an indictment, or its relationship to the broader development of rape law — gaps that a researcher must fill from primary sources and treatises such as East's *Pleas of the Crown* and Hale's *Historia Placitorum Coronae*.
Jurisdictional Note
*Rapuit* is a term of historical English common law practice and is not operative in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance is confined to legal history research, historical document analysis, and scholarship on the development of criminal pleading. American jurisdictions that followed English common law forms used the term in early colonial and post-colonial practice before the shift to English-language pleading.