Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "of the house of God." In historical English legal usage, *de casa dei* referred to a place or institution under the designation of a house of God — that is, a church, chapel, religious house, or similar ecclesiastical establishment. The phrase appears in medieval records and pleadings as a locative descriptor identifying property, jurisdiction, or persons connected to a religious foundation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a research hazard rather than a substantive legal concept. Researchers encountering *de casa dei* in medieval or early modern English legal records — particularly in land grants, ecclesiastical court documents, or pleadings involving church property — should treat it as a descriptive locative phrase rather than a term of art carrying independent legal weight. Its significance lies in identifying the ecclesiastical character of the subject matter, which would trigger distinct bodies of law: canon law jurisdiction, mortmain restrictions, and the particular rules governing alienation of church lands.
The Burrill entry is notable for its brevity and its cross-referencing approach. Burrill does not define *de casa dei* directly but redirects the researcher to "Godshall," "De Casineto / Chasineto," and "Chedney" — suggesting that the phrase functioned as one variant among several Latin and anglicized terms for similar or related concepts involving religious houses or their associated places. Researchers should follow those cross-references carefully; the clustering of terms indicates that historical records may use any of these variants interchangeably or with subtle distinctions that Burrill does not fully unpack.
The practical trap is transliteration and variant spelling. Latin descriptors for religious houses in medieval records appear in numerous corrupted, abbreviated, or anglicized forms depending on the scribe, region, and period. A search for *de casa dei* alone will miss cognate forms. Researchers working in plea rolls, cartularies, or ecclesiastical registers should cast a wide net across variant spellings before concluding that a term is absent from a source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry for *de casa dei* is among the most compressed in the dictionary — offering nothing beyond a cross-reference chain: Godshall → De Casineto / Chasineto → Chedney. This structure tells us something important: Burrill understood the term well enough to know it was part of a family of related expressions, but did not treat it as carrying independent doctrinal content requiring exposition. The redirect to anglicized forms (Godshall, Chedney) alongside the Latinized variant (De Casineto) reflects the dual-register nature of medieval English legal language, in which Latin phrases and their vernacular or semi-anglicized equivalents circulated in parallel.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Bouvier — appear to carry a standalone entry for this phrase, which is consistent with its character as a contextual descriptor rather than a doctrine-bearing term. Its absence from later dictionaries likely reflects the declining use of Latin in English legal proceedings after the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 mandated English as the language of legal record.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to English ecclesiastical and medieval common law contexts. It does not appear as a recognized term of art in American legal tradition and would not be encountered in American primary sources except in historical or comparative scholarship.