Definition
In old English law, robaria denotes the violent and forcible taking of a person's robe or outer garment. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term described the specific act of seizing another's clothing by force. Over time, robaria — along with its variant spellings roberia and robberia — came to serve as the Latin term encompassing what English law would develop into the broader offense of robbery: the forcible, violent taking of another's property. The term belongs to the technical vocabulary of medieval Latin pleading and treatise writing and does not survive in modern legal usage.
Common Confusion
Robaria, roberia, and robberia appear interchangeably across medieval sources and early legal dictionaries, and researchers should not treat variant spellings as distinct offenses. Bracton uses roberia; Fleta uses robberia; Burrill records robaria as the root form. All three refer to the same underlying concept. Modern legal usage has abandoned all three forms in favor of the English term robbery.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — particularly Year Books, plea rolls, or medieval treatises — will encounter robaria and its variants as the standard Latin placeholder for what the common law would later codify as robbery. Two traps are worth noting.
First, the term's original meaning was narrower than its evolved meaning. In its strictest sense, robaria referred specifically to the taking of a robe or garment. By the time of Bracton and Fleta, it had expanded to cover violent taking of property generally. A researcher reading a very early source must consider whether the term is being used in its narrow clothing-specific sense or its broader sense approximating robbery.
Second, the variant spellings are not jurisdictionally or doctrinally significant — they reflect scribal and authorial convention, not meaningful legal distinctions. Collapsing all three variants (robaria, roberia, robberia) into a single search or interpretive category is the correct approach.
The term connects the history of English robbery law to Continental Germanic usage: Spelman notes that the German raub and the verb rauben are cognates, reflecting shared early medieval legal concepts around violent seizure. Lord Coke substantially adopts Spelman's derivation, giving the term a thread of continuity from the earliest treatise writers through the early modern period.
For researchers tracing the doctrinal development of robbery — particularly the elements of force and the taking of property — robaria is the terminus a quo. The conceptual shift from robaria (taking of a robe) to a general violent-taking offense mirrors the broader development of English property crime law from offense-specific categories to generalized doctrinal frameworks.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source available here and provides the core derivation. Burrill traces robaria from roba (robe or garment), notes the Germanic cognate in raub and rauben, and credits Spelman for the derivation. He identifies Bracton's preferred spelling as roberia and Fleta's as robberia, establishing that all three forms were in active use among the major medieval treatise writers. Burrill records that Lord Coke substantially adopted Spelman's derivation, suggesting the term had settled etymological authority by the early modern period.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide — and what researchers should not expect to find there — is any sustained doctrinal analysis of how robaria functioned as a pleading term, what elements it required in practice, or how courts distinguished it from related offenses such as theft or extortion. For that analysis, the treatises themselves (Bracton, Fleta, Britton) are the necessary primary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Robaria is a term of English legal history and does not appear in Scottish, civilian, or American legal sources as a term of art. It is encountered exclusively in the context of medieval English law and early modern English treatise writing. Researchers working in civilian or mixed-jurisdiction traditions will find no direct counterpart.