Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning condemned, prohibited by law, or unlawful. It describes conduct or status formally disapproved or forbidden by legal authority, rendering whatever it qualifies void of legal recognition or standing.
The term appears most prominently in the compound phrase damnatus coitus — literally, an unlawful connection or illicit sexual union. Under medieval English law, children born of a damnatus coitus were not recognized as legitimate offspring and were therefore excluded from inheritance and the legal incidents of filiation. Bracton states the principle directly: Qui ex damnato coitu nascuntur inter liberos non computantur — those born of an unlawful connection are not reckoned among children.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. "Damned" in modern English carries a sense of cursed, condemned, or (colloquially) emphatic disapproval.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Damned" — adjective meaning sentenced to punishment, especially eternal punishment; cursed; detestable.
The common English word "damned" carries primarily moral or theological weight — damnation in the religious sense. The legal term damnatus is more precise and less dramatic: it denotes a formal legal status of prohibition or condemnation by positive law, with concrete civil consequences such as the denial of legitimacy to offspring. The theological overtone is absent from the legal usage.
Common Confusion
Damnatus should not be confused with the related term dampner (Law French: to condemn), which appears in Burrill's as a separate entry. Damnatus is the Latin adjectival form describing a prohibited status; dampner is the active verb form used in Law French legal proceedings to describe the act of judicial condemnation. The two appear in different documentary contexts — damnatus in learned Latin treatises such as Bracton, dampner in plea rolls and court records written in Law French.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost exclusively to medieval and early common law sources. Researchers encountering damnatus in historical texts should expect it in one of two contexts: (1) Latin treatises on legitimacy and inheritance, particularly Bracton and Glanvill, where damnatus coitus defines the category of births excluded from legal filiation; or (2) general references to unlawful or condemned conduct in canonical or civilian-influenced legal writing.
The legitimacy point is the more practically significant one. Early English law drew a hard line between children born in lawful wedlock and those born of damnatus coitus — a category that included not only children of unmarried parents but children of unions void for consanguinity, affinity, or prior subsisting marriage. Unlike the canon law position, which could retrospectively legitimate children if their parents subsequently married, early English common law (as reflected in the Statute of Merton, 1236) refused to follow the ecclesiastical rule. Researchers tracing the history of illegitimacy, bastardy proceedings, or legitimation statutes will find damnatus coitus a key conceptual anchor in the primary sources.
Because the term is purely Latin and tied to a medieval legal framework, it essentially disappears from English legal usage after the early modern period. Modern dictionary entries treat it as a historical artifact. Researchers should not expect to find damnatus in post-seventeenth-century primary sources except as a quotation from or gloss upon earlier authorities.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: condemned, prohibited by law, unlawful. The definitions are close to identical across Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence, suggesting that later compilers drew directly on a common predecessor rather than conducting independent research.
Burrill's is the most substantive entry and the only one that supplies the Bracton reference and the full Latin maxim on bastardy. The quotation — Qui ex damnato coitu nascuntur inter liberos non computantur, with citations to Bracton fol. 5, Coke on Littleton, and Blackstone's Commentaries 2:247 — gives the term its operative legal content rather than merely its translation. Researchers relying solely on Black's or Bouvier's would miss this doctrinal grounding.
None of the historical dictionaries address the distinction between English common law and canon law on retrospective legitimation, which is the context that makes damnatus coitus legally significant rather than merely descriptive. That gap reflects the tendency of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries to define terms without explaining the doctrinal controversies that gave them force.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the medieval English common law tradition and its learned Latin sources. It has no equivalent application in American law as a live doctrine, though it may appear in historical scholarship on colonial-era legitimacy rules derived from English precedent.