Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "to save." Derived from *salvus* (safe, whole, unharmed), *salvare* appeared in legal instruments and procedural contexts where saving, preserving, or excusing a legal position was at issue. Its most documented procedural use was in the phrase *salvare defaltam* — to save a default — meaning to excuse or remedy a party's failure to appear or perform a required legal act before a court. The related participial form *salvans* carried the adjectival sense of "saving" or "economical," used in describing preservation of resources or rights.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Salvare* is not a standard English word; it is the Latin infinitive from which English "save" and "salvage" ultimately derive.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not list *salvare* as an English entry, consistent with its status as a Latin legal term of art carried into English legal writing without translation.
The word's Latin root is familiar enough through English derivatives — save, salvage, salvation — but the legal sense of *salvare defaltam* (saving a default) has no direct common-language equivalent. In ordinary usage "saving" something implies preserving it from harm; in the procedural sense here, it means curing or excusing a legal failure, which is a narrower and more technical operation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter *salvare* almost exclusively in Latin passages embedded in early English legal texts, year books, and treatises such as Fleta — sources that predate English as the standard language of legal record. The term does not survive as a live term of art in modern practice; it belongs to the stratum of Law Latin that was in common professional use through the medieval and early modern periods and then dropped from active use as English displaced Latin in legal proceedings (a process completed for most purposes by the mid-eighteenth century).
The phrase *salvare defaltam* is the practically significant unit. A "default" in old procedural law was a failure to appear at the appointed day — a serious matter that could result in judgment against the defaulting party. The ability to "save" that default, meaning to offer an acceptable excuse or to take corrective procedural steps, was therefore a point of real consequence. Researchers tracing the history of default judgments, continuances, or essoins (excused absences) may find *salvare defaltam* appearing in contexts that shed light on how courts managed non-appearance before modern procedural rules formalized those mechanisms.
The *salvans* form (saving; economical) appears in a different register — administrative and manorial law rather than courtroom procedure — and researchers should not conflate the two uses when reading Fleta or similar sources.
Because *salvare* is Latin rather than Law French or Middle English, it signals a text of particular antiquity or formal scholarly citation. Its presence is itself a dating clue.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source here and provides a concise, accurate entry. Burrill identifies the two relevant uses — *salvare defaltam* and *salvans* — with citations to Fleta, the late-thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise attributed to an anonymous author writing in the tradition of Bracton. Burrill's citation to Fleta, lib. 6, c. 13, § 2 for *salvare defaltam* and lib. 2, c. 87 for *salvans* gives researchers a direct pathway to the primary source.
No other historical dictionary in the present corpus covers *salvare*. This is not surprising: the term is narrow, procedurally specific, and sufficiently archaic that it did not warrant independent treatment in most English legal dictionaries oriented toward practice. Tomlin, Bouvier, and Black's focused on terms with ongoing practical relevance; by the time those dictionaries were compiled, *salvare* had long since passed out of active legal use.
The term is best understood not as a standalone entry of major significance but as a component in a Latin phrase. Researchers relying solely on a single dictionary entry risk missing the procedural context that makes *salvare defaltam* intelligible. Reading the Fleta passages directly, alongside secondary scholarship on medieval English procedure, will yield more than any dictionary treatment can.