Definition
De bigamis (Latin: "concerning men twice married") is the conventional title of the statute 4 Edward I, St. 3 (1276), an English parliamentary enactment dealing principally with the legal status of persons who had married twice. The statute takes its name from the opening words of its fifth chapter. As a matter of legal usage, the phrase functions as a proper name — a shorthand citation to the statute itself — rather than as a descriptive term in active legal analysis.
The statute addressed consequences flowing from second marriages, particularly as they affected eligibility for clerical privilege (benefit of clergy) and related procedural rights. Under canon and common law traditions of the period, a man who had married a widow, or who had married twice, could be disqualified from claiming benefit of clergy — a significant disability in an era when that privilege offered a meaningful escape from secular criminal jurisdiction.
Common Confusion
The term de bigamis is sometimes read as equivalent to "bigamy" in its modern sense — the criminal offense of marrying while a prior marriage remains undissolved. The connection is real but imprecise. The statute's concern was not primarily with fraudulent or criminal simultaneous marriages but with the civil and ecclesiastical consequences of successive lawful marriages. Researchers encountering de bigamis in historical sources should not assume they are reading about the criminal offense of bigamy as it is understood today. The two concepts share a root but occupy different legal categories.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal sources. Researchers working in English legal history, ecclesiastical law, or the development of benefit of clergy will encounter it as a statutory citation rather than a live legal concept. Several traps exist for the unwary:
First, the statute's very authenticity was disputed. Burrill's entry notes that "from certain peculiarities in the mode of its passage, it was at one time doubted whether it was properly an act of parliament." Researchers relying on 4 Edward I, St. 3 as precedential authority in historical analysis should be aware that its parliamentary status was historically contested, though it was ultimately accepted into the body of English statute law.
Second, because the statute is cited by its Latin incipit rather than by subject matter, catalogue and index searches using "bigamy" or "marriage" will often miss it. Effective searching in historical collections requires awareness of the Latin title.
Third, the statute's treatment of benefit of clergy connects it to a broader network of medieval ecclesiastical and common law interaction. Researchers following the evolution of clerical privilege through English legal history will find de bigamis a nodal point: it marks one of the early statutory interventions into what had been primarily a canonical question.
Finally, the phrase de bigamis as a citation form reflects the broader medieval and early modern convention of naming statutes by their opening words (incipits), a practice that produced a substantial body of Latin statutory titles that bear little obvious relation to their subject matter in modern terms. Familiarity with this convention is essential for navigating early English statute rolls and the secondary literature that discusses them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill's agree on the essentials: the phrase is the title of 4 Edward I, St. 3, derived from the initial words of the fifth chapter, and the standard references are Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 272) and Reeves's History of English Law (2 Reeves' Hist. 142). Burrill's entry is marginally more informative, adding the detail that the statute contains only six chapters and noting the dispute over its parliamentary character — information absent from both Black's editions. None of the three historical dictionary sources elaborates on the statute's substantive provisions or its relationship to benefit of clergy doctrine; researchers needing that analysis must proceed to Coke and Reeves directly, or to modern scholarship on medieval English law.
Jurisdictional Note
De bigamis is a term of purely English legal history. It has no operative force in any current jurisdiction. American legal sources referencing it do so only in historical or comparative contexts. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal history will not encounter it as an applicable authority.