Definition
An obsolete spelling variant of outlawry. Utlary denotes the legal condition of being placed outside the protection of the law as a formal judicial or sovereign act — the status of an outlaw. A person subjected to utlary (the utlagus or outlaw) forfeited the ordinary protections of the legal order: they could not sue in court, could not compel the attendance of witnesses, and in earlier common law practice could be killed by any subject without legal consequence. The term appears primarily in Norman-French and early English legal records and was interchangeable with the forms utlagarie and utlawry. For substantive treatment, see OUTLAWRY.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of outlawry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Outlawry. [Obs.] — Camden.
The legal and common meanings are essentially identical here, but both are historical. The gap worth noting is temporal, not conceptual: by the time Webster's 1913 recorded utlary as obsolete, the institution of outlawry itself had already been substantially abolished in English law (formally by statute in the nineteenth century). A researcher encountering utlary in a source is dealing not only with an archaic spelling but with a legal institution that had ceased active operation.
Common Confusion
Three spellings appear in close proximity in historical sources and are easily conflated: UTLARY, UTLAWRY, and UTLAGARIE. All three refer to the same legal condition. Rapalje & Lawrence lists utlary and utlawry as separate headwords, but the entries are cross-referential and substantively identical. UTLESSE, which appears in the same dictionary cluster, is a distinct term — it refers to an escape of a felon from prison, not to the imposition of outlaw status — and should not be confused with utlary despite its similar appearance in Norman-French sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Utlary is a spelling variant, not a distinct legal concept, so the research value of the term is primarily navigational: recognizing it in a historical document and knowing where to look next. Several practical points bear emphasis.
First, spelling instability is extreme. Norman-French legal terminology was transcribed by English clerks across centuries without standardization. A researcher working in Year Books, plea rolls, or early treatises may encounter utlagarie, utlary, utlawry, outlawry, and outlaw status all used interchangeably within a single document. The forms do not signal different legal regimes.
Second, the substantive law of outlawry evolved significantly. In early common law, the consequences of utlary were severe and quasi-automatic. By the later common law period, outlawry had become largely a procedural device used to compel appearance — the dramatic early consequences had been stripped away. A researcher must identify not only the term but the period in which it appears to understand what legal consequences are actually at stake.
Third, Rapalje & Lawrence's placement of utlary, utlawry, and utlesse in immediate proximity reflects common editorial practice in historical legal dictionaries: clustering Norman-French variants together regardless of whether they share substantive meaning. This proximity can mislead a researcher into treating escape from prison (utlesse) as a subspecies of outlawry when it is not.
Fourth, Law Mind corpus researchers should expect utlary to appear almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English sources and in American sources that are themselves drawing on those English authorities. It will not appear in modern American statutory or case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the primary historical dictionary source here, and its entry is lean but structurally useful. It correctly identifies the Norman-French root (utlagarie), ties the term to the Anglo-Saxon uttaga, cross-references Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 128a) and Littleton (Litt. 197) as the authoritative English sources, and redirects the reader to OUTLAW for substantive treatment. The Webster's 1913 entry, citing Camden, confirms that the term was already considered obsolete in general English usage by the early modern period.
No historical dictionary source consulted provides substantive definition under utlary itself — they uniformly treat it as a variant spelling requiring a redirect. This is consistent with the term's status as a form rather than an independent legal category.
Jurisdictional Note
Utlary as a term is English and appears in American legal sources only where American courts or writers are citing English common law authorities. American law never developed a doctrine of outlawry with the same consequences as the English institution, and the spelling utlary has no independent American legal history.