Definition
A Latin term of medieval English legal usage denoting a charge, accusation, or criminal imputation brought against a person. In the context of early English law, rettum referred to the formal accusation or the specific criminal matter for which a person had been arrested or held to answer. It appears most prominently in provisions governing the arrest and trial of clerics, where the nature of the rettum determined whether ecclesiastical or royal jurisdiction would apply, and in Magna Carta-era instruments specifying the categories of offense serious enough to override ordinary procedural protections.
The term carried a meaning roughly equivalent to "a charge of crime" and was used to classify the gravity or kind of accusation rather than to describe the act itself. Certain retta — such as homicide or forest offenses — could justify arrest or detention by royal authority even where general protections against summary seizure might otherwise apply.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, plea rolls, or statutes from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries will encounter rettum in contexts where modern translations may render it loosely as "charge" or "accusation" without capturing its technical function as a jurisdictional trigger. The term matters most in two research situations.
First, in materials touching the Statute of Marlborough (1267) and related legislation governing clerical privilege, the nature of the rettum determined whether a cleric could claim benefit of clergy and be remanded to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Not all accusations carried equal procedural consequence — some retta were explicitly carved out as grounds for royal detention regardless of clerical status. Researchers following benefit of clergy doctrine through the corpus must track how courts and commentators classified accusations under this framework.
Second, in Magna Carta scholarship and commentary, rettum appears in provisions limiting the circumstances under which the Crown could arrest or detain without ordinary process. The Latin text reserves royal prerogative for arrest in cases of homicide, forest offenses, and aliquo alio retto — some other charge — according to the custom of England. This residual category generated interpretive controversy: what qualified as a sufficient rettum to justify extraordinary detention? Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae (c. 1470) engages this question, and researchers using Fortescue as a source should consult the annotated editions that gloss the term directly.
The word does not survive into modern legal English in any active doctrinal sense. It is a purely historical research term, useful for locating and interpreting primary sources but carrying no operative meaning in contemporary law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential foundation for this term. Burrill traces rettum to the Law French rette, meaning a criminal charge or accusation, and situates it within the Statute of Marlborough (52 Hen. III, c. 28), which used the phrase crimine aliquo vel retto to describe the circumstances under which a cleric might be arrested. Burrill also quotes the relevant passage from the body of English custom governing arrests — including the carve-outs for homicide and forest offenses — where rettum functions as the operative classificatory noun.
Burrill's treatment is narrower than the term's full historical reach. He identifies the statutory context but does not trace how courts interpreted the residual category of qualifying retta over time, nor does he engage the procedural consequences of misclassification in the plea rolls. Researchers should treat Burrill as an entry point to the primary materials rather than a complete account.
No entry for rettum appears in standard modern legal dictionaries, which reflects its obsolescence as an operative term. Black's Law Dictionary does not include it. The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval Latin legal drafting, and its meaning must be reconstructed from the statutory and treatise context in which it appears.
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Jurisdictional Note
Rettum is specific to medieval English legal sources and has no counterpart in Scots, Irish, or continental legal systems using parallel terminology. Researchers working in comparative medieval law should not assume the term translates directly across jurisdictions even where Latin was the shared drafting language.
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