Definition
A Latin term from old English and Roman law meaning "to call" or "to call upon." In legal contexts, vocare carried two related but distinct uses: (1) its general sense of summoning or calling a party before a tribunal, and (2) its more specific technical sense in English real property practice, where it meant to vouch — that is, to call upon a third party (a warrantor) to come into court and defend title to land on behalf of a defendant in a real action. In this latter sense, vocare functioned as the operative verb underlying the formal process of vouching to warranty.
The phrase vocare ad warrantum — to call upon to warrant — captures the procedural core of the term as it appears in the old English real actions. When a tenant (defendant) in a writ of right or other real action claimed that a third party had warranted title to the land at issue, the tenant could vocare that warrantor into the proceedings, compelling them either to defend the title or to yield equivalent land in exchange. The illustrative form preserved in Burrill — Si ita vocaverit, voco talem, filium et hæredem ("if he so vouches, I vouch such a one, son and heir") — reflects the formulaic oral pleading by which this call was made in court.
Why It Matters in Research
Vocare is not a term researchers will encounter in modern legal materials. It belongs to the vocabulary of the medieval real actions — writs of right, writs of entry, and their procedural machinery — which were abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and related reforms, and which never took firm root in American practice. Its primary research value is interpretive: understanding vocare is essential for reading medieval and early modern pleading records, Year Books, and Bracton's De Legibus, where the vouching process appears repeatedly and the verb vocare or its derivatives mark each step of that process.
Researchers working in English legal history before roughly 1700 should treat vocare as a signal that a vouching-to-warranty transaction is underway. When you encounter it in a plea roll or legal treatise, identify the parties: who is vouching (the tenant), who is being vouched (the warrantor), and what the claimed basis of warranty is. The formula preserved by Burrill — naming the warrantor as "son and heir" — illustrates that warranty obligations ran with inheritances and were enforceable against heirs, a doctrine with significant implications for how medieval land tenure worked in practice.
Do not conflate vocare with the general Latin sense of summoning in non-property contexts. In ecclesiastical and Roman law sources, vocare appears in broader procedural settings, simply meaning to call a party. Context — especially the presence of the phrase ad warrantum — is the key to identifying when the technical English real property meaning applies.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill defines vocare with characteristic economy: "To call; to call upon," locating the term within old English practice and identifying its central application as vouching to warranty. The illustrative formula Si ita vocaverit, voco talem, filium et hæredem is included without extended commentary, functioning more as a specimen of pleading form than as doctrinal explanation.
Burrill's entry, while accurate as far as it goes, provides no broader doctrinal context — no explanation of what warranty meant, what consequences flowed from a successful or failed voucher, or how vocare ad warrantum connected to the larger system of real actions. Researchers relying solely on Burrill will know what the word means but will not understand its procedural stakes. For the fuller picture, Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and Glanvill's Tractatus de Legibus provide primary doctrinal treatment of warranty and vouching in their original Latin contexts. Coke's Institutes and the older abridgments (Fitzherbert, Rolle) treat vouching extensively in English.
No meaningful divergence exists between Burrill and other historical sources on the core definition. The term is stable and technical, with no recorded semantic drift.