Definition
In old English law, to outlaw a person; to place someone outside the protection of the law. The act of utlagare was a formal legal process by which a freeman was stripped of all legal standing — rendered incapable of bringing suit, owning property, or claiming the protections ordinarily afforded to subjects of the crown. A person subjected to utlagare was thereafter treated as if they had no existence in the eyes of the law and could, in early medieval practice, be killed by any person without legal consequence to the killer.
The term functions as a verb (to utlagare) and is closely associated with the noun forms utlagh and utlagatus, denoting the outlaw himself.
Common Confusion
Utlagare (the act) is sometimes conflated with utlagatus or utlagh (the person subjected to outlawry). The distinction is between the verb denoting the legal act and the noun denoting the resulting status. In practice, historical sources use related forms interchangeably or without precision, so researchers should read surrounding context carefully rather than relying on the specific Latin form to determine whether a source is describing the process, the person, or the condition.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval English legal sources — plea rolls, year books, and early treatises — and in scholarly commentary on those sources. Researchers encountering utlagare in primary documents should understand that it refers to a specific legal act, not merely a general state of being a criminal or fugitive. The distinction matters because outlawry as a formal process had procedural requirements and legal consequences that differed substantially from mere criminal conviction or exile.
The most significant research connection is to Magna Carta, Chapter 29 (Chapter 39 in the 1215 original), which explicitly prohibits the outlawing of any free man except by the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land. The Latin passage quoted by Burrill — Nullus liber homo capiatur aut utlagetur, aut exulatur — is one of the most cited clauses in Anglo-American constitutional history. Researchers tracing the lineage of due process, liberty, and equal protection doctrines will find utlagare embedded in that foundational text.
Be alert to the fact that historical sources treat utlagare as a term of Latin-inflected Anglo-Saxon law. It does not translate cleanly into modern legal categories. Researchers working with 19th-century digest literature may find the concept subsumed under "outlawry" without the Latin term appearing at all, which can create gaps when searching across different layers of the corpus.
The secondary formula quoted by Burrill — extunc utlagabitur, sicut ille qui est extra legem, sicut Laughelesman — confirms that the outlawed person was equated with a Laughelesman, a term from early English law denoting one entirely outside legal protection. This cross-reference signals that researchers investigating the social and legal categories of medieval English society (serfs, villeins, foreigners, exiles) will find utlagare sitting at a conceptual intersection with several overlapping status terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source for this entry and provides the essential substance: the Latin derivation, the Saxon root (utlagh), the Magna Carta citation, and the secondary formula equating the outlawed person with one who is extra legem. No competing definitions exist across the available sources to create divergence.
What Burrill does not address is the procedural machinery that triggered utlagare — the repeated failures to appear in court (called defaults) that historically preceded a formal outlawry judgment. Nor does he address the later decline of outlawry as a functioning legal remedy in English law, a process largely complete by the nineteenth century. Researchers should not assume from Burrill's entry that utlagare had any practical operation in the legal system of his own time; by the mid-1800s it was essentially an antiquarian term.
The Magna Carta quotation Burrill supplies is genuine and traceable. Researchers should note that Chapter 29 of the 1225 reissue corresponds to Chapter 39 of the original 1215 charter, a common source of confusion in citations across centuries of commentary.
Jurisdictional Note
Utlagare is a term of English law with no direct equivalent in civil law systems. In American legal history, outlawry was never formally adopted as a systematic legal institution, though analogous ideas — such as the placing of fugitives outside ordinary legal process — have appeared in various contexts. Researchers should treat this as a term of English and early common law history rather than a living concept in any modern jurisdiction.