Definition
Receptare is a Latin term from old English law meaning to receive or harbor a felon. It describes the act of knowingly sheltering, concealing, or providing refuge to a person who has committed a serious crime — including outlaws, murderers, robbers, and burglars — after the commission of that crime. The term appears primarily in medieval English legal texts and oath formulations, where community members were bound to swear they would not engage in receptare with respect to designated criminal fugitives.
Common Confusion
Receptare should not be confused with the modern offense of accessory after the fact, though the conduct it describes is the historical antecedent of that doctrine. Receptare also overlaps conceptually with the later English term "maintenance" in a narrow sense and with "receiving stolen goods," but these are distinct: receptare concerns harboring the person of a felon, not receiving the proceeds of the crime. Researchers encountering the term in medieval sources should resist reading modern accessory liability frameworks backward into contexts where receptare is used.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a term of art in medieval English legal sources. Researchers will encounter receptare in Bracton and similar early common law treatises, as well as in oath formulations, eyre records, and presentment materials from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Its significance is largely historical: the duty not to receptare was an affirmative communal obligation enforced through sworn oaths, reflecting a legal order in which the harboring of outlaws was treated as a quasi-public offense threatening the king's peace rather than a purely private wrong.
The term drops out of practical legal usage as the common law develops more precise categories — accessory after the fact, misprision, and obstruction — and as outlawry itself declines as a legal mechanism. Researchers working in post-medieval English sources are unlikely to encounter receptare as a live legal term, though it may appear in scholarly commentary on early criminal law.
One research trap: the Latin root is shared with receptator (a habitual receiver or harbourer of felons), which appears in some sources as a noun form describing the person who commits the act. Burrill does not separately define receptator, but it appears in cognate sources. Researchers should treat receptare (the act) and receptator (the actor) as analytically related but textually distinct entries when working through medieval Latin legal materials.
The quoted oath fragment from Bracton — jurare debent quod utlagatos, murdritores, robbatores et burglatores non receptabunt, nec eis consentient — is a useful index of the crimes treated as serious enough in the period to generate sworn anti-harboring obligations. The pairing of "not harbor" with "nor consent to them" suggests that receptare in practice encompassed both active sheltering and knowing acquiescence, anticipating the later distinction between principal harboring and more passive complicity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise. It correctly situates receptare as a term of old English law, supplies the Bracton citation, and captures both the Latin meaning and the operative legal context — sworn community obligations. The entry does not attempt to trace the term into later English law, which is appropriate given that it largely disappears from technical usage before the modern period.
No other Law Mind shelf sources separately treat receptare, which reflects its status as a term confined to medieval Latin legal discourse. Researchers seeking fuller treatment should consult Bracton directly (De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, folio 115b, as cited by Burrill) and secondary scholarship on early English criminal law and the law of outlawry.
Jurisdictional Note
Receptare is a term of medieval English law with no direct equivalent in American legal doctrine. It has no operative legal meaning in any current jurisdiction. Its relevance is entirely historical and scholarly.