Definition
Sacrobarra is an obscure Latin term appearing in early English legal manuscripts, noted by the antiquarian lexicographer Henry Spelman in a manuscript treatise on the office of the coroner (De officio coronatoris). Its precise legal meaning is uncertain. Spelman tentatively suggested it may be synonymous with or related to sacrilegia — that is, sacrilege, the violation or profanation of sacred things or places. Beyond this speculative identification, no authoritative legal definition has been established. The term does not appear in mainstream common law doctrine and carries no recognized technical legal meaning in modern practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
Sacrobarra is a research artifact more than a research destination. Its primary value to Law Mind corpus researchers is as an illustration of the limits of historical legal lexicography: even careful compilers like Burrill, drawing on Spelman's extensive manuscript work, sometimes preserved terms whose meaning was opaque even to contemporaries. A researcher encountering sacrobarra in a medieval or early modern English legal document should treat it as a term requiring contextual manuscript analysis rather than dictionary resolution.
Several navigational cautions apply:
First, the term appears in a narrow manuscript tradition connected to coroners' practice. Any researcher working in the history of the coroner's office, particularly in its Anglo-Norman and early modern English forms, may encounter the term as surrounding vocabulary rather than operative legal language.
Second, the suggested connection to sacrilegia is speculative and not independently confirmed by other dictionary sources. Do not carry that equivalence forward into analysis without further primary source support. Spelman himself hedged the suggestion.
Third, the Burrill entry is unusual in that it is sandwiched between a maxim (Saepenumero ubi proprietas verborum attenditur, sensus veritatis amittitur — "Oftentimes where the propriety of words is attended to, the true sense is lost") and a subsequent entry for Saepius. The proximity to that maxim is likely incidental typographic arrangement in the original, not editorial commentary on sacrobarra itself, but the irony is notable: the maxim cautions against over-attending to the precise wording of terms at the expense of true meaning — a fitting neighbor for a term whose precise meaning no one has satisfactorily recovered.
Fourth, this term will not appear in standard modern legal indexes, digests, or secondary authorities. Searching Law Mind's corpus for sacrobarra will produce only this entry and any primary manuscript references that may have been digitized. Absence of results elsewhere is expected, not a sign of search error.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only documented source for sacrobarra in the historical legal dictionary tradition accessible through Law Mind. Burrill attributes the term entirely to Spelman, citing the manuscript De officio coronatoris, and adds no independent analysis beyond relaying Spelman's cautious suggestion that the term might mean sacrilegia. Burrill does not claim certainty, and the entry's brevity signals that even at the time of compilation this was a term of antiquarian curiosity rather than living legal utility.
No entry for sacrobarra appears in the other major historical law dictionaries — not in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary in its earlier editions. This absence is itself informative: the term was sufficiently obscure that most compilers did not consider it worth preserving. Burrill's inclusion reflects his broader ambition to capture the full range of Latin and Law Latin terminology from manuscript and early printed sources, including terms that had fallen entirely out of use.
The maxim quoted in the Burrill entry (attributed to Branch's Principia and Coke) is a genuine and well-traveled legal maxim in the common law tradition, though its placement here appears to be a function of alphabetical proximity in the source, not substantive connection to sacrobarra.
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Jurisdictional Note
Sacrobarra has no recognized meaning in any modern common law jurisdiction. It is relevant only to the legal history of England and to the paleographic and manuscript traditions of medieval and early modern English legal records.
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