Definition
The Latin and Law Latin ancestor of the modern English word "verdict." In old English law, a veredictum was a formal declaration of the truth of a matter in issue, submitted to a jury for determination at trial. The term carried both procedural and philosophical weight: it designated not merely the jury's finding but the act of truth-speaking itself — the jury's authoritative statement of what the facts were.
The classic formulation, drawn from Coke's Littleton and repeated across the historical dictionaries, captures the concept precisely: Veredictum, quasi dictum veritatis; ut judicium quasi juris dictum — "The verdict is, as it were, the dictum of truth; as the judgment is the dictum of law." This paired formulation draws a deliberate distinction between the jury's function (finding facts, speaking truth) and the court's function (declaring law). The veredictum belongs to the first domain; the judicium to the second.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A written document in Old English law detailing the facts presented as true at a trial.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; subsumed under "verdict," from the same Latin root.
Editorial note: The Wiktionary definition, while not wrong, undersells the term's technical force. Veredictum was not simply a written record of facts but the formal legal act of a jury speaking truth on a disputed matter — a constitutive pronouncement, not merely a documentary artifact. Researchers encountering the term in historical pleadings or treatises should understand it as a technical antecedent to "verdict," not as a neutral evidentiary document.
Common Confusion
Veredictum and judicium are sometimes conflated in casual readings of Latin legal texts, but the historical sources are careful to keep them apart. The veredictum is what the jury delivers — a declaration of fact. The judicium is what the court pronounces — a declaration of law. Coke's formulation quoted above exists precisely to enforce this boundary. Researchers reading medieval or early modern English legal records should watch for this distinction, especially in Year Book materials and early common law pleadings where Latin terminology was standard.
Why It Matters in Research
Veredictum appears almost exclusively in historical sources — Latin pleadings, Year Books, early common law treatises, and the works of Coke and Bracton — and has no living presence in modern legal usage. Researchers working with pre-modern English legal records will encounter it as the operative term where a modern document would say "verdict."
Two research traps warrant attention. First, the term's absence from modern digests and databases means that full-text searches for "verdict" will not surface documents using veredictum, and vice versa. Researchers working in digitized historical collections must search both forms, along with variant spellings. Second, the Wiktionary gloss ("a written document") may mislead researchers into treating veredictum as a specific document type akin to an inquisition or presentment. In practice, the term encompasses the jury's oral and written declaration interchangeably, depending on period and context.
The Coke quotation — Co. Litt. 226 — cited identically across all three source dictionaries is a genuine touchstone. Coke on Littleton was among the most authoritative common law texts of the seventeenth century, and its framing of veredictum became the standard English-language gloss on the term. Researchers citing this formulation should trace it to that source rather than to the dictionaries that reproduce it.
Corpus connections: Because veredictum is the formal Latin predicate of the English jury system, it appears in foundational discussions of jury trial, attaint (the early mechanism for challenging a false verdict), and the distinction between fact and law in common law adjudication. It is a conceptual entry point into the deep structure of how medieval and early modern English law divided the labor of truth-finding between jury and judge.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 1st and 2nd editions are nearly identical on this term, both providing the Latin definition, the procedural context, and the Coke quotation without elaboration. Neither edition attempts to trace how the term evolved or when it fell out of formal use, leaving a gap that researchers must bridge through primary sources.
Burrill's Law Dictionary adds the most value by providing the Latin derivation — verè (truly) or verus (true) combined with dictum (a saying) — and an incidental reference to Fleta, the thirteenth-century legal treatise, in the surrounding text. The Fleta reference is fragmentary in the Burrill entry as reproduced, but its presence signals that veredictum was already a technical term of art in the earliest period of systematic common law writing, predating even Coke by several centuries.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the question of whether veredictum had subtypes (general versus special, for instance) in the way that modern "verdict" does. That silence is itself informative: the historical dictionaries treat the Latin term as a unified concept, leaving the doctrinal differentiation of verdict types to the English-language entries under "verdict."
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Verdict — for the full doctrinal development of jury findings from veredictum through modern general, special, and directed verdicts.
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Jury Trial — for the constitutional and historical framework within which the veredictum functioned.