Definition
A Latin verb from old English law meaning to ransom, to redeem by payment, or to punish by imposition of a fine. In legal usage, *redimere* denoted the compulsion of a person to pay a fine or ransom as a form of legal punishment or settlement — the act by which a lord, court, or crown extracted a monetary penalty from an offender or subject. The term captures both sides of a transaction: the authority's act of demanding payment and the obligor's act of buying back liberty, privilege, or freedom from penalty.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Latin for "to buy back" or "to redeem"; the root of the English word "redeem," meaning to recover something by payment or to fulfill a promise or obligation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To redeem; to buy back; to ransom. Webster's traces the English "redeem" directly to this Latin root.
The gap between the common and legal meaning is subtle but important. In ordinary usage, "redeem" suggests a voluntary transaction — recovering something one previously possessed. In its old English legal sense, *redimere* carried coercive force: the fine or ransom was imposed by authority, not chosen by the payer. The "buying back" was of liberty, standing, or freedom from further penalty, under compulsion of law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter *redimere* primarily in the context of medieval English forest law and related crown prerogative instruments. The term appears in Latin statutory and charter texts rather than in common law pleading records, and it is rarely found in English-language digests or abridgments without the underlying Latin source being examined.
Two documents anchor its appearance in the corpus: the Statute of Westminster II (1285) and the Carta de Foresta (Charter of the Forest, 1217, with later reissues). In forest law texts, *redimere* describes the mechanism by which offenders against forest regulations — poaching, unlawful assarting, or trespass — could be compelled to pay fines rather than suffer corporal punishment. Understanding this term unlocks the practical operation of amercement and ransom in the forest eyre.
Researchers should be alert to the distinction between *redimere* as a penalty mechanism and the concept of *redemption* in later equity and property law. They are etymologically related but functionally distinct: the property law concept of equity of redemption involves a mortgagor's right to recover pledged land, which shares the "buying back" structure but operates in an entirely different doctrinal framework. Conflating the two in historical searches will produce noise.
The term also connects to the broader vocabulary of compulsory fine-payment in medieval law: *amerciamentum* (amercement), *misericordia* (mercy fine), and *rançon* in Anglo-Norman sources. Cross-referencing these terms will produce a fuller picture of how financial penalties operated in medieval English courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term, and its entry is terse but accurate. Burrill identifies the term as belonging to old English law specifically, signals its coercive quality ("to compel to pay"), and anchors it to the two most important primary sources: Statute of Westminster II, chapter 36, and the Carta de Foresta, chapter 10. This is consistent with the term's actual appearance in those documents.
What Burrill does not supply — and what researchers should seek elsewhere — is any explanation of how the fine-ransom mechanism worked procedurally, who held the authority to impose it, or how it related to the forest eyre system. For that context, forest law treatises and the scholarship surrounding the Charter of the Forest provide necessary background that no historical legal dictionary covers.
Older civilian dictionaries (Thomas, Spelman's Glossary) treat *redimere* in its classical Latin sense without developing the specifically coercive English legal application. Researchers using those sources should weight Burrill's more targeted treatment for English legal contexts.
Jurisdictional Note
*Redimere* as a legal term of art is specific to medieval English law and its Latin-language statutory instruments. It has no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions and does not appear in American legal sources except as a historical reference.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Medieval Forest Law; Amercement; Charter of the Forest