Definition
In medieval European legal practice, to summon a party to court a second time; to re-summon. The term describes the act of issuing a repeated or renewed judicial summons when an initial summons had failed to produce the party's appearance or had otherwise proved insufficient. It is a term of the old Latin legal vocabulary associated with early Frankish and Germanic legal procedure, and it appears in formularies and glossaries documenting pre-common-law continental practice rather than in the English common law tradition proper.
Why It Matters in Research
REMALLARE is a narrow procedural term encountered almost exclusively in sources dealing with early medieval European law — Frankish formularies, Carolingian legal documents, and the glossarial tradition that grew up around them. A researcher will not find it operative in English common law reports or statutes. Its value in a Law Mind corpus search is primarily lexical and historical: the term signals that the surrounding document or treatise is engaging with continental Germanic procedure, likely through the lens of Spelman's Glossarium or similar scholarly apparatus.
The root verb mallare (to summon, from the Frankish mallum, an assembly or court) underlies several related terms — mallum, mallare, admallare — and understanding the family of terms helps orient a researcher reading documents from the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. The prefix re- is straightforwardly iterative, so remallare is simply the renewed exercise of the same summoning function.
Researchers tracing the history of default judgments, contumacy doctrine, or compulsory appearance in court will find remallare useful as an early procedural antecedent, though the doctrinal line between the continental re-summons and later common law process for compelling attendance is indirect. The term more directly informs scholarship on how early European courts handled non-appearance — a repeated summons was a prerequisite before more coercive measures or judgment by default could follow.
Because this term surfaces in formulary collections rather than in enacted codes or reported decisions, the researcher should treat occurrences as evidence of scribal and notarial practice rather than black-letter legal rule.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical English-language legal dictionary source for this term. Burrill defines it economically: to summon to court a second time; to re-summon. He cites the Formulae Solemnes (a collection of Frankish legal formularies) and Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, both of which are the natural homes for a term of this character. No divergence among historical sources is worth noting because the term is too narrow and too historically bounded to have generated competing definitions. What historical dictionary sources collectively do not provide is any doctrinal analysis of when remallare was required, how many re-summonses preceded default, or what procedural consequences followed — for that, the researcher must go directly to the formulary texts and to secondary scholarship on Frankish legal procedure.