Definition
To take away property or goods by force. Rifflare is a term of medieval legal Latin denoting the act of forcible taking or plundering — the seizure of another's property through violence or compulsion rather than by stealth or fraud. It describes the physical act of stripping or carrying away goods against the will of the possessor.
The term is encountered primarily in early legal pleadings and indictments, particularly in formulas charging robbery, pillage, or armed taking. It functions as a term of art in the verbal machinery of the common law writ tradition rather than as a substantive legal concept with its own independent doctrinal framework.
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Common Confusion
Rifflare should not be confused with the broader offense of robbery, though it describes conduct that would now be charged as robbery or theft by force. It also should not be conflated with terms describing clandestine taking (such as furtum, the Latin root of larceny), which require absence of force. The specific force element is what distinguishes rifflare from ordinary taking language in historical pleading.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering rifflare will find it almost exclusively in historical sources: medieval and early modern English pleading records, Latin indictments, and treatises that reproduce archaic charging formulas. The term does not survive into modern statutory or case law usage and will not appear in contemporary legal materials.
The primary research trap is encountering rifflare in a transcribed indictment or record and misreading it as a substantive offense distinct from robbery. It is better understood as pleading language — a Latin participle or infinitive used to describe the act within a larger charging formula — rather than as a named crime with separate elements.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that this term is most likely to surface in:
— Historical English criminal pleading records and form books predating the rationalization of common law indictment language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
— Treatises on criminal pleading that catalog archaic Latin phrases used in indictments.
— Comparative or historical scholarship on the Latin vocabulary of early common law writs.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry appears to be partially garbled, running text from a separate entry (on public and private rights) directly into the rifflare definition. Researchers should treat the Rapalje & Lawrence text with caution and rely on Bouvier's cleaner formulation — "to take away anything by force" — as the authoritative brief definition.
Because rifflare has no continuing life as a term of art in American or modern English law, it carries no jurisdictional variation and no ongoing doctrinal significance. Its value is entirely historical and philological.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the cleanest and most useful definition: "to take away anything by force." This is a minimal but accurate description of the term's function in legal Latin pleading.
Rapalje & Lawrence appear to have suffered a typesetting or editorial error in their entry, appending what reads as text from an adjacent entry on public and private rights — "those rights which arise from relations other than membership of a community" — directly to the rifflare definition. This produces a nonsensical combined entry. Researchers relying on Rapalje & Lawrence for this term should discard the appended text as a transcription artifact.
Neither source offers historical depth, contextual usage examples, or connection to specific pleading forms. Neither source links rifflare explicitly to robbery doctrine or to the Latin roots of larceny. Scholars seeking fuller treatment of forcible taking language in historical English law will need to look beyond these two dictionaries to works on medieval plea rolls and early criminal pleading form books.
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