Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "from birth" or "from nativity." Used in legal texts to indicate that a condition, disability, or status is congenital — that is, it arose at birth rather than through subsequent circumstance or act. The phrase historically appeared most often in the context of inherited servitude, physical incapacity, or legal disability that attached to a person from the moment of birth and required no further event to become operative.
Common Confusion
Do not conflate a nativitate with ab initio. Both are Latin phrases describing conditions that apply from an originating moment, but they operate in distinct contexts. Ab initio means "from the beginning" and is used to describe legal acts, contracts, or statuses that are void or operative from their inception — it is a transactional and doctrinal term still in active use. A nativitate is a status term rooted in the person's birth and is largely confined to historical materials on personal legal condition and feudal tenure. The two phrases are not interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term researchers encounter almost exclusively in historical sources. Its primary legal context is medieval and early modern English law, where villeinage — a form of feudal serfdom — was distinguished by whether the condition of bondage arose from birth (a nativitate) or from some other cause. A villein a nativitate was born into servitude; the status was not merely personal but potentially heritable.
Researchers working in early English common law materials, Bracton, Glanvill, or the original Register of Writs (Registrum Omnium Brevium) will encounter the phrase in this precise context. When scanning historical treatises or digests for references to disability or status, be alert to the phrase being used loosely to mean any condition present from birth — not only servitude. Blackstone uses it in this broader sense at 3 Bl. Com. 332.
The term has no operative role in modern legal writing. Its appearance in a contemporary document would signal either deliberate archaism or a direct quotation from a historical source. Researchers should not expect to find it in post-nineteenth-century statutory or case law materials without such a framing.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four shelf sources are in close agreement on the core meaning. All define the phrase as "from birth" and indicate that it denotes a congenital condition or status. Burrill's is the most useful for research purposes, explicitly citing both the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 266b) and Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Com. 332) — the two sources most likely to be consulted when the phrase appears in historical legal documents.
Black's (both editions) appends the maxim A non posse ad non esse sequitur argumentum necessarie negative — "from impossibility to non-existence, the inference follows necessarily in the negative" — immediately following the entry for a nativitate. This juxtaposition appears to be an artifact of alphabetical arrangement rather than a substantive connection; the maxim is a separate logical proposition and should not be read as modifying or elaborating the definition of a nativitate.
Bouvier's entry is the briefest and least instructive, providing the definition and a bare citation without explanatory context. None of the historical dictionaries address the term's specific use in villeinage doctrine in depth, which means researchers should look past the dictionary shelf to Blackstone's Commentaries and the Registrum Originale for fuller treatment.