Definition
An obsolete Law French verb used in early English legal proceedings meaning to accuse, charge, or impute something to a person's account. In historical usage, *retter* (also appearing in inflected forms such as *rette* and *retter à*) carried the sense of formally laying blame, fault, or responsibility upon someone—particularly attributing a harm, loss, or wrongful outcome to that person's negligence or folly. The term does not name a legal actor or a legal concept so much as it describes the act of accusation or imputation itself. It appears most frequently in plea roll language and in the Year Books, where the court or a party asserts that a particular consequence must be "reckoned to" or "charged against" the opposing party.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "One who rets"—that is, one who soaks plant material (such as flax or hemp) to loosen fibers. An entirely separate word rooted in textile craft.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; "ret" as a verb refers to the same soaking process in fiber preparation.
The legal *retter* and the textile *retter* are unrelated words that happen to share a spelling in modern romanization. Encountering *retter* in a legal manuscript or early printed report has nothing to do with fiber processing; the legal term derives from Law French accusatory vocabulary, while the common word derives from a distinct Germanic root. Researchers should not allow a Wiktionary or Webster's result to mislead them when the term appears in a legal source.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially inaccessible to researchers who approach early English legal records without exposure to Law French vocabulary. Several practical traps exist.
First, *retter* appears in variant spellings across manuscript and printed Year Book sources—*retter*, *rett*, *rette*, *arretter*, and *arrett*—reflecting the phonetic instability of Law French as it was written by English scribes. A full-text search on a single spelling will miss cognate forms in the same or adjacent records.
Second, the term's function is syntactic as much as substantive: it signals that one party is imputing fault or loss to another, often in the context of what today would be analyzed as contributory negligence or assumption of risk reasoning. Recognizing *retter* allows a researcher to identify the early doctrinal seeds of fault-attribution analysis in common law pleading, even before those concepts acquired their modern names.
Third, the corpus sources in which *retter* naturally appears—Year Books, Britton, Littleton's Tenures—are among the oldest and most linguistically challenging materials on the Law Mind shelf. The term will not appear in post-seventeenth-century sources because Law French was effectively abolished as a language of pleading in England by statute in 1731. Any appearance of *retter* therefore dates a passage to the medieval or early modern period and signals that the surrounding text requires Law French interpretive context.
Fourth, researchers following a doctrinal thread from early fault-attribution language toward modern negligence concepts should use *retter* as a waypoint: its usage in Britton and the Year Books connects to later vocabulary such as *default*, *negligence*, and *folly* (*folie*) that bridge Law French pleading and English common law doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only shelf-source entry and offers genuine utility. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Law French, glosses its core meanings (to accuse, charge, lay to the charge of, account), and supplies three illustrative quotations from identifiable sources: Britton chapter 59, Year Books Hillary Term 10 Edward III at folio 8, and Littleton's Tenures section 261. These references are verifiable in standard editions and give researchers concrete entry points into the primary sources.
What Burrill does not do is trace the doctrinal significance of the term or connect it to the development of fault-attribution in negligence law. His entry is descriptive and philological rather than analytical. No other major historical law dictionary on the shelf—not Black's, not Bouvier's—separately entries *retter*, which underscores its status as a term that disappeared from active legal vocabulary before those dictionaries were compiled. Burrill's coverage, therefore, is both the starting point and the ceiling for dictionary-level support; primary source investigation is required to go further.
Jurisdictional Note
*Retter* belongs exclusively to the English common law tradition as transmitted through Law French pleading. It has no independent life in Scots law, civil law systems, or American legal materials. Post-colonial American courts did not inherit Law French as a working pleading language, so the term is of purely historical and comparative significance outside England.