Definition
A Latin locution meaning "of Saint Clare" or "of Saint Clair," functioning in historical legal records primarily as a place-name or personal-name element rather than as a legal term of art. In medieval and early modern common law records, the phrase appears as a toponym or surname component identifying a person or place associated with a religious house, locality, or family bearing the name of Saint Clare or Saint Clair. It is encountered most often in property records, conveyances, and plea rolls where parties or estates are identified by reference to their place of origin or family name.
Common Confusion
De Sancta Clara is not a procedural term, doctrine, or rule of law. Researchers encountering it in a legal record should treat it as a name identifier — not a legal concept — and attend to its variant spellings. As Burrill's entry signals, the same name appears in records as St. Clare, St. Clair, Sencleer, Sinclere, De Sylva (in a separate but editorially adjacent note), and other anglicized or latinized forms. Conflating variant spellings or misreading a party's surname as a legal phrase is a practical risk in manuscript sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research relevance of De Sancta Clara is paleographic and indexing: in Latin plea rolls, feet of fines, and patent rolls of the medieval and early modern periods, parties' names were routinely rendered in Latinized form. A person named Sinclair or St. Clair in vernacular records appears as de Sancta Clara in the Latin original. Researchers working across both Latin originals and English calendars or abstracts must recognize that these are the same name in different registers.
Index and finding-aid lookups can fail if a researcher searches only for one spelling. The Law Mind corpus may contain instruments and records in which this locution appears as a party identifier; the entry point for locating those records may be any of the variant forms Burrill lists. Burrill's editorial choice to cross-reference St. Clare, St. Clair, Sencleer, and Sinclere in a single entry is itself useful navigational intelligence: it confirms that lexicographers working with historical English records recognized the variation as a genuine retrieval problem.
There is no doctrinal evolution to track here. The term does not carry legal meaning that changed over time. What changes is the orthographic convention: Latin records use de Sancta Clara; law French records may use de Seint Cler or variant forms; Early Modern English records increasingly use anglicized spellings. The closer a record is to the medieval period, the more likely the Latin form will appear.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source with an entry for this term, and its treatment is deliberately cross-referential rather than definitional. Burrill lists the term alongside "St. Clare," "St. Clair," "Sencleer," and "Sinclere," treating the cluster as a name-form problem rather than a legal concept requiring definition. The editorial note also references "De Sylva," suggesting Burrill was cataloguing personal and place names appearing in reports and records rather than articulating a rule of law.
No other major historical law dictionaries — not Bouvier, not Black's, not Jacob's — carry a dedicated entry for De Sancta Clara as a legal term, which is consistent with its character as a name element rather than a legal doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The Latin form de Sancta Clara is most characteristic of English and Anglo-Norman records. Researchers working with Scottish records may encounter the Sinclair spelling (a prominent Scottish family name) more frequently in vernacular instruments, while Latin charters from Scotland will use the same Latinized form as English records.