Definition
In old European law, to stop or close a wound. The term appears in early Germanic legal codes, particularly in the context of provisions regulating bodily injury and the obligations attending to wounded persons. Its legal significance lay not in describing the injury itself but in the act of stanching or binding it — a distinction that carried practical consequences in early medieval compensation schemes.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in sources treating early medieval Germanic law, particularly the Lex Alamannorum. It does not migrate into common law, civil law, or modern statutory usage. Its appearance in Burrill signals that it was preserved chiefly as a term of antiquarian and comparative legal interest rather than as a living doctrinal concept.
The practical research trap here is scope creep: a researcher working on historical wound-law, wergild structures, or early Germanic tort analogues may encounter stuppare and mistake it for a term with broader civilian or canon law lineage. It does not have one in any well-documented form. Treat it as lexically confined to the Alamannic codes and their immediate commentators.
If you are tracing the legal treatment of wound care obligations in early medieval law — including who bore the duty to close a wound, and what failure to do so meant for compensation liability — stuppare is a useful node, but only within that narrow corpus. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the secondary source Burrill relies upon, and researchers working seriously in this area should consult Spelman directly rather than relying on Burrill's brief notice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. The definition is spare: "To stop; to close a wound," with a citation to title 59 of the Lex Alamannorum and a reference to Spelman. No other historical law dictionary in the standard corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin — carries an independent entry for this term, which confirms its narrow scope.
Burrill's inclusion of stuppare is consistent with his broader project of preserving Latinate terms from pre-common-law European sources, particularly where those terms illuminate concepts that have rough analogues in later legal development. The citation to Spelman (Glossarium Archaeologicum) is credible and appropriate; Spelman's glossary was the standard English-language reference for medieval Latin legal terminology at the time Burrill compiled his dictionary.
What historical sources collectively miss is any extended analysis of the legal consequences attached to the act of stuppare — whether the obligation to close a wound was enforceable, who bore it, and what sanctions followed from breach. The Lex Alamannorum itself addresses wounds in considerable detail, but the dictionary tradition treats stuppare only at the level of bare definition.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the Lex Alamannorum, an early medieval Germanic code governing the Alamanni of the upper Rhine and Danube regions. It has no recognized application in English, Scottish, French, or Roman law traditions.