Definition
Res adiratae (Latin: "things that have gone astray") is a medieval legal term referring to goods or property that has left a person's possession against their will — lost, strayed, or taken — without the owner necessarily asserting that the loss was the result of a crime. The term describes both the condition of the property and the form of legal claim available to the owner who wished to recover it without lodging a criminal accusation.
Under the old English common law of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a person who lost possession of goods involuntarily had a choice between two remedies: (1) bringing a criminal appeal — either the appeal of robbery (analogous to the actio vi bonorum raptorum) or the appeal of larceny (analogous to the actio furti), both of which required alleging and proving a felonious taking; or (2) claiming the goods as res adiratae, meaning simply that the goods were his and had departed from his possession without his consent, without making any accusation of theft or felony against any particular person.
The res adiratae claim was thus the civil or non-accusatory path to recovery. It allowed an owner to pursue the return of property while sidestepping the grave consequences that attached to a failed criminal appeal — which could expose the unsuccessful appellant to punishment for false accusation.
Why It Matters in Research
Res adiratae is a term almost entirely confined to the earliest stratum of English legal history — roughly the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — and surfaces almost exclusively in sources drawing on Bracton. Researchers encountering this term in primary or secondary sources should understand it as a marker of the transitional period when English law was still distinguishing between civil and criminal remedies for dispossession, a distinction that later common law would reorganize entirely under the forms of action (particularly detinue and replevin on the civil side, and indictment on the criminal side).
The key research trap is anachronism. Modern categories — civil versus criminal, tort versus crime, property recovery versus prosecution — do not map cleanly onto the twelfth-century framework this term inhabits. A researcher reading Bracton or secondary literature discussing early possessory remedies must resist importing later categorical thinking. Res adiratae represents an owner's ability to assert a proprietary claim to lost or taken goods without triggering the machinery of criminal accusation; this is conceptually closer to a modern replevin or conversion action than to any criminal proceeding, but it is not identical to either.
The term also appears in discussions of the historical development of strict liability and the distinction between intentional and non-intentional interference with property — threads that eventually run into the law of conversion and the old action of trover. Researchers tracing the genealogy of possessory actions or the early law of theft should note res adiratae as a waypoint on that doctrinal road.
Because the term is Latin and technical, it will not appear in most general indexes. Search Bracton directly (folio 150), and look for secondary literature on early English possessory remedies, the appeals of felony, and the development of the forms of action.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the primary source capturing this term for American legal research audiences, and its treatment is derivative of Bracton. Bouvier correctly identifies res adiratae as one of two twelfth-century remedies for involuntary loss of possession and draws the essential distinction between the accusatory path (the criminal appeals) and the non-accusatory path (the res adiratae claim). The entry is faithful to Bracton's account.
What Bouvier does not do — and what no historical dictionary in the standard shelf fully develops — is trace what happened to this remedy. The res adiratae claim does not survive as a named form of action into the mature common law. Its functional successor is likely the action of detinue or replevin, but the connection is historical and structural rather than doctrinal. Researchers should treat Bouvier's entry as a point of entry to Bracton, not as a complete account of the term's legal life.
No other standard historical dictionaries (Black's early editions, Termes de la Ley, Cowell's Interpreter) give res adiratae a dedicated entry, which itself signals the term's confinement to the earliest period of English legal history and to scholarship engaging directly with Bracton's text.
Jurisdictional Note
Res adiratae is a historical term of English medieval law with no direct counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as a live doctrine. It is relevant today only in historical and comparative legal research contexts.