Definition
A Latin term from civil and old English law designating a person who has renounced the Christian faith — an apostate. The term carried legal, not merely theological, consequences: in the ecclesiastical and common law traditions, apostasy was a recognized legal status that subjected a person to specific civil disabilities and procedural remedies. The term appears most often in legal sources as the root of the derivative writ *apostata capiendo*.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "apostate."
Historical common usage: An apostate is one who abandons a formerly held religious faith or political allegiance.
The gap here is directional. In ordinary language, "apostate" is a descriptive label for a spiritual or ideological defection. In civil and old English law, *apostata* was a term of legal art that triggered enforceable consequences — writs, custody, and civil disability — not merely social or ecclesiastical censure. The legal usage is narrower: it referred specifically to renunciation of the Christian faith, and in English practice, often specifically to members of religious orders who abandoned their vows.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
APOSTATA CAPIENDO: The primary legal instrument associated with this status. An obsolete English writ directed to the sheriff commanding the seizure and return of an apostate — typically a member of a monastic order who had fled or violated the rules of religious life — and his delivery into the custody of the relevant abbot or prior. The writ appears in the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) and represents the enforcement mechanism that gave the term *apostata* its practical legal significance. Without this writ, the status would have been purely canonical rather than actionable at common law.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in pre-Reformation English legal sources and in civil law materials drawing on the Justinianic Codex (Cod. 1, 7). Researchers should note several navigational points:
First, *apostata* as a legally operative status effectively became obsolete following the English Reformation. After the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the institutional infrastructure — the religious houses to whose custody apostates were returned — ceased to exist in England, and the writ *apostata capiendo* lost its practical application. Sources post-dating the mid-sixteenth century that mention the term are almost always doing so historically or taxonomically, not as living law.
Second, the term occupies an intersection between canon law and common law that can mislead researchers expecting clean doctrinal boundaries. The writ *apostata capiendo* was a common law remedy enforcing what was fundamentally an ecclesiastical status. Researchers working in either tradition alone may miss the other dimension.
Third, do not conflate this with the broader category of religious disqualification in English law. *Apostata* referred to formal renunciation of faith or breach of religious vows; separate doctrines governed heresy, recusancy, and nonconformity. These are related but legally distinct categories with different procedural histories.
Fourth, the Registrum Omnium Brevium citation (Reg. Orig. 71b) is the primary English source for the writ form. Researchers tracing the procedural history should go there directly rather than relying on secondary dictionary summaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill are in close agreement on the core definition, all drawing on the same two sources: Cod. 1, 7 (the Justinianic Codex) and the Registrum Omnium Brevium. The second edition of Black's adds the entry for *apostata capiendo* with a description of the writ's operation, which the first edition and Burrill omit or treat only implicitly.
None of the historical dictionaries address the post-Reformation obsolescence of the term, nor do they situate it within the broader architecture of English religious law (heresy, recusancy, nonconformity). For a term that is by any measure a historical artifact by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the entries are descriptive without analytical context — useful for identifying the term in a source but not for understanding its place in legal history.
Burrill's Greek gloss (ἀποστάτης) is a minor point of distinction, confirming the classical lineage, but adds nothing to the legal content.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative legal meaning in any modern common law or civil law jurisdiction. It belongs entirely to historical English law and to the civil law tradition as reflected in the Justinianic Codex. Researchers encountering it in modern materials are almost certainly reading historical analysis or an ecclesiastical law source, not positive law.