Definition
Receptamentum (plural: receptamenta) is a term from old English and medieval Latin law denoting the act of receiving or harboring a felon after the commission of a felony. It is the formal legal designation for what modern law would recognize as the conduct of an accessory after the fact — specifically, giving shelter, concealment, or refuge to a person known to have committed a crime, thereby aiding that person in evading justice.
The term is closely associated with its Law French equivalent, recettement, and corresponds to the Scots law concept of resetting. The underlying wrong is not participation in the original offense but the subsequent act of sheltering the offender, which was treated as a distinct criminal liability in early common law.
Common Confusion
Receptamentum should not be confused with the related but distinct concepts of maintenance (supporting another's litigation) or champerty. More practically, researchers should distinguish it from the broader category of accessoryship before the fact, which concerns assistance rendered prior to the crime. Receptamentum is specifically post-offense concealment or harboring. In Scots law, the parallel term resetting carried equivalent meaning and survived in active legal use considerably longer than its English counterpart; a researcher encountering resetting in Scottish sources should understand it as the functional equivalent.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources, most prominently in the treatises of Bracton and Fleta, where it forms part of a systematic treatment of criminal liability extended to those who assisted felons after the fact. Researchers working in those primary texts will encounter receptamentum as a term of art requiring precise understanding — it is not a generic word for receiving stolen goods (which was a distinct offense) but refers to the personal harboring of a criminal actor.
The term essentially disappears from English legal usage as the common law developed more refined statutory and doctrinal categories for accessorial liability. By the time of Blackstone's Commentaries, the conduct it described was subsumed under the rubric of accessory after the fact, and the Latin term had been displaced. Researchers using Law Mind corpus sources from the sixteenth century onward should therefore search under those modern-equivalent terms rather than expecting receptamentum to appear in post-medieval materials.
A further trap: receptamentum is sometimes loosely grouped in secondary literature with offenses involving receiving stolen property, since both involve a kind of post-crime reception. The distinction matters. Receiving stolen goods is an offense against property rights; receptamentum is an offense against the administration of justice — the wrong is shielding the person, not acquiring the goods. Conflating the two concepts when reading early sources will distort the analysis.
Jurisdictional connection to Scots law is significant. Resetting in Scotland had an independent doctrinal development and persisted as a recognized term in Scottish legal writing into the modern period. Researchers tracing the history of harboring offenses comparatively across English and Scottish sources should map receptamentum (English/Latin) against recettement (Law French) against resetting (Scots) as cognate but jurisdictionally distinct concepts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: receptamentum is defined as receiptment — the receiving or harboring of a felon after the commission of the crime — citing Bracton (fol. 152b) and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 31, § 8). Burrill also notes the Law French equivalent recettement and the Scots parallel resetting, which is useful orientation for cross-jurisdictional research.
No divergence among historical dictionary sources arises here because the term appears in only one dictionary on the Law Mind shelf. What Burrill does well is anchor the term to its primary textual sources and signal the Scots law connection. What the entry does not supply is any elaboration on the elements of the offense, the available defenses, or how liability was actually assessed in practice — for that, researchers must go directly to Bracton and Fleta, the cited primary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Receptamentum as a Latin term of art is specific to the medieval English common law tradition and the treatise literature deriving from it. The Scots law cognate, resetting, developed independently and retained active use in Scottish criminal law well beyond the period in which receptamentum had any practical English application. Modern jurisdictions handle the underlying conduct through statutory offenses variously denominated as harboring a fugitive, accessory after the fact, or obstruction of justice.