Definition
A Latin legal term from old English law meaning a robber. The term appears primarily in legal treatises and indictment records of the medieval period, functioning as the formal Latin designation for one who commits robbery. It is a classifier of criminal actors rather than a description of the offense itself.
Common Confusion
ROBBATOR should not be conflated with ROBBER as a modern legal term. While the meanings are equivalent, robbator is a term of art confined to Latin legal sources and has no operative role in any modern jurisdiction. A researcher encountering robbator in a historical document is in the domain of legal history and medieval Latin paleography, not contemporary criminal law doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
ROBBATOR is an archival term with no modern operative legal significance. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in Latin passages from medieval English legal treatises, particularly Bracton and Fleta, and in transcriptions of early English criminal records or indictments. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law.
The chief research trap is distinguishing between the actor term (robbator, meaning the person) and the offense term (robbery or its Latin equivalents). Medieval sources habitually paired categories of criminal actors — robbatores et burglatores (robbers and burglars) — in lists that influenced the structure of early common law felony classifications. Researchers tracing the doctrinal history of robbery or burglary as distinct felonies should treat this pairing as a marker of where those offenses were conceptually separated in the treatise tradition.
Bracton's usage is the primary locus. The folio references cited across the historical dictionaries differ slightly (fol. 115b, fol. 1156, fol. 1160), reflecting the pagination inconsistencies across different manuscript and printed editions of Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae — a known problem in Bracton scholarship. Researchers should verify folio references against the Thorne edition (Harvard, 1968–1977) rather than relying on folio numbers as cited in the historical dictionaries.
Fleta, the anonymous thirteenth-century treatise that draws heavily on Bracton, also uses robbator in a similar classificatory context, offering a secondary corroborating source for the term's medieval currency.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core meaning: a robber, appearing in old English law as a Latin term. Bouvier's entry is the most spare, offering only "A robber. Bract." Burrill's is the most useful, supplying both the derivation (from robbare) and the dual citation to Bracton and Fleta. Black's first and second editions reproduce essentially the same content with minor typographical variation, likely the product of transcription error in the second edition's entry (the garbled text "Robbatorea et burglatores, eohvere and burglars" appears to be a corrupted reproduction of the first edition's clean Latin phrase).
None of the historical dictionaries provide substantive analysis of how the term functioned within medieval felony doctrine, nor do they trace its disappearance from legal usage. The entries are essentially glosses, adequate for identification but not for doctrinal research.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Robbery — Historical Development; Felony Classification at Common Law