Definition
A Latin verb used in medieval English legal pleading and scholarship meaning "to rob" or "to take away by force or violence." The term appears in Latin-language legal texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in works of technical pleading, to describe the act of violent dispossession. It is the Latin form underlying the English legal concept of robbery and was employed where a pleader or writer needed to allege that property had been taken from another's custody by force.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal sources — Year Books, plea rolls, and the foundational treatise literature — will encounter robbare and its conjugated forms where later materials would use "robbery" or "felonious taking." The term is not merely decorative Latin: it carries legal weight in the pleading formula, as the specific allegation that goods were "robbed out of custody" (robbata fuerit de custodia sua) was a required element of the claim. A researcher misreading this formula as a general allegation of theft will miss the custodial dimension — the pleader must establish not just that the goods were taken, but that they were taken from the party's custody specifically.
The term bridges early Latin treatise law and later common law robbery doctrine. Bracton and Fleta, the two primary sources cited in connection with robbare, are essential texts for understanding how common law felony categories were being systematized in the thirteenth century. Bracton (fol. 146) and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 39, § 3) are not interchangeable authorities: Fleta post-dates Bracton and in places corrects or elaborates it, so a term's appearance in both signals durability in the tradition, but the formulations may differ. Researchers should compare the two passages rather than treating them as a single unified source.
For corpus researchers working in Law Mind's historical materials, robbare signals proximity to the Latin law stratum — sources written in or directly translating from legal Latin. It does not appear in English-language common law materials of the sixteenth century and later, where "robbery" and "feloniously take and carry away" become the operative terms. The shift in language also tracks a conceptual refinement: the later doctrine elaborated force and fear as the defining features of robbery, a specificity that robbare as a term does not itself carry.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only direct entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. Burrill renders robbare as "to rob; to take away violently" and supplies the pleading formula from Bracton: docere oportet quod de custodia sua robbata fuerit — "he ought to show that it was robbed out of his custody." The citation to both Bracton and Fleta is significant, as Burrill is identifying the term's authoritative home in foundational treatise law rather than in case reporters or statutes.
No other Law Mind historical dictionaries carry a dedicated entry for robbare. This is expected: the term is Latin pleading vocabulary that would appear in Latin-law glossaries and law French companions rather than in the generalist English common law dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers should not interpret its absence from Bouvier, Black, or similar sources as evidence that the term was obscure — it was simply operating in a different textual register than those dictionaries served. For fuller treatment of the term's medieval Latin context, the Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (Du Cange) and Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum are the appropriate scholarly companions outside the Law Mind corpus.
Jurisdictional Note
Robbare is a term of medieval English law and appears in the foundational treatise literature of that tradition. It has no independent application in Scottish, continental, or later American legal sources. Researchers working in Anglo-American robbery doctrine beyond the medieval period should work from the English-language authorities.