Definition
UNARE is a Latin term appearing in two distinct senses in old English legal records:
1. (From *unus*, one) To unite; to join together as one. Used in Latin legal formularies and early English legal proceedings to describe persons or parties combining or uniting themselves. The phrase *seipsos unaverunt* — "they united themselves" — appears in this sense.
2. (Agricultural/records usage) To inn; to gather in, or to make up hay fit for carriage after mowing. Found in cartularies and estate records where manorial obligations or rights relating to hay harvest were recorded.
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Common Confusion
The two meanings of *unare* are etymologically and contextually distinct. The first derives from *unus* (one) and belongs to the vocabulary of legal combination or association. The second is an agricultural term of practice rooted in estate management and manorial custom. A researcher encountering the word in a cartulary or account roll should not assume the unity-of-persons meaning; context — particularly the presence of agricultural subject matter, seasonal references, or manorial obligations — will determine which sense applies.
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Why It Matters in Research
UNARE is a term a researcher is more likely to encounter than to seek. It surfaces in transcriptions of medieval Latin records — plea rolls, cartularies, and early case reports — rather than in any systematic legal doctrine. Two navigational points matter:
First, the dual meaning creates a real interpretive trap. Both senses appear in Latin records from broadly similar periods, and neither is common enough to be immediately recognizable. A transcription of a manorial cartulary using *unare* in the hay-gathering sense could be misread as describing a legal association or joinder if the agricultural context is not recognized.
Second, the legal (unity) sense, attested in Dyer's reports, connects to early procedural questions about joinder of parties or collective action — matters that later developed their own distinct vocabulary (*joinder*, *combination*, *confederacy*). Researchers tracing the conceptual history of party joinder or collective legal action in early English law may find *unare* a useful data point, but it is a waypoint, not a terminus. The term does not carry forward into modern legal usage in either sense.
Researchers working in medieval Latin legal records more broadly should be aware that agricultural and manorial Latin shares vocabulary with legal Latin, and that dictionaries like Du Cange's *Glossarium* and the *Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources* (R.E. Latham et al.) are essential companions for disambiguating such terms — resources that go well beyond what Burrill alone can provide.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term, and it provides both senses. Burrill cites Dyer's Reports (100) for the unity meaning and the Cartulary of St. Edmund for the agricultural meaning — both are real historical sources. The entry is brief and purely definitional; Burrill makes no attempt to contextualize either meaning within broader legal doctrine.
No other major historical law dictionaries — not Jacob's *Law Dictionary*, not Tomlin's, not Black's early editions — carry this term, which reflects its status as a piece of specialized archival Latin rather than operative legal vocabulary. The absence of the term from those sources is itself informative: *unare* did not enter the working vocabulary of English common law as a term of art.
Burrill's dual entry is accurate as far as it goes but leaves the researcher without guidance on which meaning to apply or how to situate either sense historically. The agricultural meaning in particular belongs as much to the history of manorial administration as to legal history proper.
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Jurisdictional Note
UNARE is a term of historical English law and estate records. It has no counterpart in American legal usage and no ongoing jurisdictional relevance. Research context is exclusively English medieval and early modern.
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