Definition
In old European law, to take or carry away. Talare appears in medieval Latin legal texts derived from Germanic legal codes, denoting the act of removing or carrying off property. The term is encountered principally in the Lex Alamannorum and the Lex Ribuaria — two of the major Frankish tribal law compilations of the early medieval period — where it describes the physical act of taking away goods or chattels, typically in contexts establishing liability or penalty for such removal.
Related inflected forms appearing in the same sources include taltum (carried away, as a past participial or adjectival form) and talaverint (a conjugated form indicating plural past action, i.e., "they shall have carried away" or "they carried away").
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Why It Matters in Research
Talare is a term of very narrow historical utility. Researchers will encounter it only when working directly with primary texts of early Germanic law — the Leges Barbarorum — or with legal antiquarians who cited those texts. It does not appear in the English common law tradition and has no operative modern legal equivalent.
Key research intelligence:
The term belongs to a body of Latin that is not classical but rather the vulgar or administrative Latin used to record Germanic customary law from roughly the sixth through ninth centuries. Researchers should not expect standard classical Latin dictionaries to supply accurate readings. Legal Latin dictionaries grounded in medieval sources — such as Du Cange's Glossarium — are more reliable guides to this vocabulary than general-purpose resources.
The Lex Alamannorum (Law of the Alemanni) and Lex Ribuaria (Law of the Ripuarian Franks) are the specific statutory homes of this term as cited by Burrill. Both codes survive in manuscript tradition and have been edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series. Any researcher following Burrill's citations should consult those edited texts rather than relying on the bare Latin fragments Burrill reproduces, which are compressed and stripped of surrounding context.
The Saxon root identified by Burrill — talan, to pull off — reflects the broader philological project of nineteenth-century legal lexicography, which frequently traced Latin legal terms to vernacular Germanic origins. This etymological framing is characteristic of Burrill's method and of the comparative law scholarship of his era. It is useful for understanding how the term was interpreted by his contemporaries but should not be treated as authoritative modern etymology without independent verification.
Because talare is a verb form embedded in specific code provisions establishing liability for wrongful taking, it functions in those texts similarly to the role that terms like caption or asportation play in common law — identifying the physical act element of a taking offense. Researchers working on the history of theft, property offenses, or the development of concepts of possession and dispossession in Western legal history may find the parallel conceptually productive even though the terms belong to entirely separate legal traditions.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term, and his entry is brief. He supplies the Latin etymology, identifies the Germanic root, provides the two primary code references (Lex Alamannorum tit. 34 and Lex Ribuaria tit. 64), and notes the inflected forms taltum and talaverint without extended commentary.
Burrill's entry is representative of his approach to obsolete continental law terms: he records them as reference anchors for researchers working backward from English legal history into its Frankish and Germanic antecedents, without attempting a full doctrinal analysis. The entry is accurate as far as it goes but deliberately minimal. No other major historical English legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin — appears to have carried this term, which confirms its status as a specialist term of continental rather than English legal provenance.
The omission of talare from the broader Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition is itself informative: the term never crossed into the English common law lexicon and was not needed by practitioners. It survived in legal reference literature primarily through the antiquarian and comparative law interests of scholars like Burrill.
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Jurisdictional Note
Talare has no current jurisdictional application. It is confined to the historical record of early medieval Germanic law. Researchers encountering the term today will do so exclusively in historical or comparative legal scholarship.
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