Definition
In old English and Law French usage, an accusation or charge, particularly a formal charge of criminal wrongdoing such as felony. The term appears in early English statutory law, notably in the Statute of Westminster I (1275), in the context of clerical defendants taken into custody on a charge of felony. It is a term of medieval legal pleading and procedure, not a term of modern law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recognized as a current English word.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Listed only with the notation "See Aret. [Obs.] Chaucer," indicating the word was already archaic by 1913.
The Webster's reference points toward a now-obsolete verb form meaning to accuse or impute blame, appearing in Middle English literary sources. The legal term RETTE is a noun form, drawn from Law French administrative and court usage, and carries the specific procedural sense of a formal criminal accusation — a more precise and institutional meaning than the general literary sense of blame or reproach found in Chaucer.
Common Confusion
RETTE and RETROSPECTIVE appear as consecutive or nearby entries in some editions of Black's Law Dictionary, which may cause confusion in archival research when entries are not clearly separated. The entry immediately preceding RETTE in some Black's editions concerns retrospective statutes and cites 2 Gallison 139. These are entirely unrelated terms; the adjacency is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement and printing layout, not any conceptual connection.
Why It Matters in Research
RETTE is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in two contexts: transcriptions or translations of medieval English statutes, particularly the Statutes of Westminster, and in historical legal dictionaries or glossaries of Law French. It has no living doctrinal significance and does not appear in modern case law or statutory codes.
The primary research trap is misreading the Black's Law Dictionary entry. In some printings, residual text from the preceding RETROSPECTIVE entry runs immediately before the RETTE entry without clean visual separation, creating a garbled block of text. Researchers consulting microfilm, scanned facsimiles, or older digital transcriptions of Black's should treat any Black's RETTE entry that references statutes or vested rights with suspicion — that material belongs to a different entry entirely.
For researchers working in the history of English criminal procedure or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, RETTE connects directly to the question of benefit of clergy. The phrase quoted by Burrill — "when a clerk is taken on a charge of felony" — reflects the specific procedural moment at which a clergyman's status became relevant to whether secular courts retained jurisdiction. The term thus serves as a lexical marker for early disputes between royal and ecclesiastical courts over criminal defendants.
Researchers should also note that Law French terms like RETTE rarely appear in consistent spelling across medieval sources. Variant spellings may occur in primary documents, and legal dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes normalized spellings that original sources did not.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in agreement on the core definition: RETTE is Law French for an accusation or charge, sourced to the Statute of Westminster I, chapter 2. Burrill provides the most useful entry, supplying the original Law French phrase and its translation, which gives the term its procedural context — specifically, the arrest of a clerk on a felony charge.
Black's first and second editions reproduce the definition with only minor variation in citation style. Neither edition expands meaningfully on the term's procedural significance or its relationship to benefit of clergy doctrine, which is the historically important context Burrill's phrase implies. Researchers looking for deeper treatment of the underlying doctrine will need to move beyond dictionary sources entirely.
None of the historical dictionaries address the term's disappearance from English legal usage or indicate when it fell out of active practice. Given its appearance only in statutory context and its absence from any post-medieval legal literature, the term was likely a formal term of art tied to a specific statutory text rather than a term in broad circulation in the courts.