Definition
A concubine. The term appears in early legal sources as a variant spelling of "concubine," denoting a woman who cohabits with a man outside the formal bonds of marriage. Two meanings appear in historical legal usage:
(1) In the general common-law sense: a woman who lives with a man as a domestic partner without the legal status of a wife. The relationship implies a degree of permanence and domestic intimacy distinguishing it from casual association, but it carries no formal legal recognition.
(2) In Roman law: a woman occupying a recognized but legally inferior domestic status — a de facto companion or secondary partner — upon whom the male cohabitant did not confer his social rank, legal privileges, or the full incidents of matrimony. Roman law gave the concubinatus a defined, if subordinate, legal character not replicated in common-law systems.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A concubine is a woman who lives with a man but has lower status than a wife; in historical contexts, a secondary wife or kept woman.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A woman who cohabits with a man without being his wife; a kept mistress."
The gap between common and legal meaning is modest but real. In common usage the word carries a strongly pejorative or archaic connotation — the "kept mistress" framing implies moral censure and economic dependency. In historical legal usage, particularly in Roman and civil-law traditions, the concubinatus was a recognized legal institution with defined (if limited) rights and obligations attaching to both parties. Researchers should not read modern moral overtones back into legal sources that treat the status as a formal category.
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Common Confusion
CONOCUBINE vs. CONCUBINE: "Conocubine" is not a distinct legal term with independent meaning. It is a scribal or typographical variant of "concubine" appearing in older manuscripts, printed legal dictionaries, and court records. Researchers encountering "conocubine" in historical sources should treat it as equivalent to "concubine" and not infer any specialized meaning from the spelling difference. The variant likely reflects inconsistent orthography common before standardized legal typography.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century legal materials — colonial records, ecclesiastical court proceedings, civil-law treatises, and early American cases dealing with inheritance, legitimacy of children, or property claims arising from long-term cohabitation. Several research traps apply:
Spelling variation is the primary obstacle. Historical documents use "concubine," "conocubine," "concubyn," and further variants interchangeably. Full-text corpus searches should account for these variants; a search limited to any single spelling will miss relevant documents.
The Roman law meaning and the common-law meaning are not interchangeable. Sources drawing on civil-law tradition (Louisiana, early ecclesiastical materials, Roman-law treatises) may assign specific legal incidents to the concubinage relationship — such as limited inheritance rights for concubine-born children — that simply did not apply in common-law jurisdictions. A researcher must identify which tradition the source is working within before drawing conclusions about legal consequences.
Legitimacy and inheritance intersect heavily here. Disputes over the legal status of children born to a concubine — and whether those children could inherit — drove much of the historical litigation that generated legal definitions of this term. Researchers working on intestacy, bastardy, or legitimation doctrine will find "concubine" and its variants appearing as operative terms in both pleadings and judicial opinions.
The term is functionally obsolete in modern American law, having been displaced by "cohabitant," "domestic partner," and similar language. Do not expect to find it in post-mid-twentieth-century American sources.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) gives two definitions tracking the general common-law meaning and the Roman law meaning respectively. This dual treatment is characteristic of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American legal dictionaries, which routinely incorporated Roman and civil-law definitions even for terms with limited direct application in common-law practice, reflecting the scholarly conventions of the era.
What Black's does not address: the practical legal consequences that attached to concubinage relationships in jurisdictions recognizing them, the procedural posture in which courts were asked to characterize a relationship as concubinage rather than marriage, or the evidentiary questions (particularly common-law marriage doctrine) that made the boundary between wife and concubine genuinely contested. Researchers should not rely on dictionary definitions alone to understand how courts actually resolved these questions in specific jurisdictions and eras.
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Jurisdictional Note
Louisiana, with its civil-law heritage, historically gave more formal legal recognition to the incidents of concubinage than common-law states. In common-law jurisdictions, any legal rights arising from a concubinage relationship were typically addressed — if at all — through doctrines of implied contract, resulting trust, or common-law marriage rather than through the status of concubinage itself.
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