Definition
Recordator is a Latin legal term used in early English law to denote a recorder — specifically, a judicial or quasi-judicial officer charged with keeping official records of a court or municipality. The term appears in medieval and early modern English legal sources as a Latinized form of the office title, consistent with the practice of rendering institutional roles into Latin for formal legal instruments and pleadings.
The recorder, as an office, held significant legal authority in English borough courts. Recorders were typically trained lawyers appointed to serve as the chief legal officer of a city or borough, presiding over sessions of the peace and other local courts, and maintaining the official record of proceedings. The term recordator thus designates that officer in his record-keeping and judicial capacity.
Common Confusion
Recordator should not be confused with terms related to American land record systems, such as "recorder of deeds" or "county recorder." Those offices derive from American statutory frameworks governing the registration of property instruments and have no meaningful connection to the English judicial office designated by recordator. The phonetic and visual similarity can mislead researchers working across common-law traditions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering recordator in historical English legal documents should treat it as a direct equivalent of recorder — but the equivalence requires context. The term appears almost exclusively in Latin pleadings, writs, and formal instruments predating or contemporaneous with the period when English legal procedure was conducted in Law Latin. After the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 (which mandated English in legal proceedings), Latin forms like recordator largely disappear from operative legal documents, though they persist in scholarly and antiquarian legal writing.
The single citation in Burrill — 12 East, 559 — refers to a volume of East's Term Reports from the English King's Bench, placing the term's documented legal use in the early nineteenth century. Researchers using Law Mind's corpus should be alert to the fact that when recordator appears in a source, it likely signals either a historical document predating Anglicization of court procedure or a scholarly gloss on an older instrument. Do not conflate the office of recorder with modern record-keeping clerks or court reporters; the recorder in English borough law was a judicial officer, not a clerical one.
This term has essentially no relevance to American recording systems (the recording of deeds and instruments in a registry), despite superficial similarity. The American "recorder of deeds" is a distinct office and concept; recordator should not be imported into research on American land records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entirety of the available historical dictionary support for this term: "L. Lat. In English law. Recorder. 12 East, 559." The entry is characteristically terse, functioning as a cross-reference rather than an explanation. This is consistent with Burrill's treatment of Latin law terms that had clear English equivalents — he identifies the language, the jurisdiction, and the English equivalent, then anchors the usage with a reporter citation.
No substantive definition is offered beyond the equivalence to recorder, which reflects the term's role as a purely formal Latin rendering of an English office title rather than a term with independent doctrinal content. Researchers seeking fuller treatment of the recorder's functions and powers should consult historical sources on English borough courts and the commissions of the peace, where the office is extensively documented under its English name.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Encyclopedia entries most proximate to this term address recording in the context of property law (realestate_40: Recording — Priority, Indexing, and the Effect of Recording on Third Parties) and criminal record systems (criminal_243: Expungement, Sealing, and Record Clearing; criminal_251: Juvenile Records — Confidentiality and Sealing). None of these entries addresses the office of recorder in the English borough court sense. Researchers should treat recordator as falling outside the scope of those encyclopedia entries and consult historical English legal materials directly.