Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "while he was within age" or "while he was under age." In English common law, *dum fuit infra etatem* was the name of a writ available to a person who, during infancy, had made a feoffment in fee of his lands, or a gift for life or in tail. Upon reaching full age, the former infant could sue out this writ to recover the land so alienated. The writ was abolished by the Statute of Limitations 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 27), which reformed the real actions system in England.
Common Language
This is pure Latin legal terminology with no counterpart in ordinary English usage. The phrase translates literally as "while he was within age" or "while he was under age." No common language section applies.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in pre-nineteenth-century English legal materials — Year Books, common law pleading treatises, and early American sources drawing on English real property law. Researchers face two practical challenges.
First, the writ's abolition in 1833 means that *dum fuit infra etatem* essentially disappears from operative legal materials after that date. Finding it cited in nineteenth-century American sources typically signals either historical exposition or a jurisdiction that retained older forms of real action longer than England did.
Second, the writ must be distinguished from the related protective mechanisms available to an infant in the same period. An infant who had made a voidable alienation during minority could, before reaching full age, simply enter the land — the entry itself operated as a remitter, restoring the infant to the ancestral title without resort to any writ. The writ *dum fuit infra etatem* was the formal legal remedy available after majority was attained, when the right to enter may have been displaced or when a judicial proceeding was necessary to establish title against a third party. Understanding this procedural sequence is essential for correctly reading pleadings and case reports from the period.
Researchers working in early American land title chains should also be alert to the principle underlying this writ — that infant alienations were voidable, not void — because that distinction governed whether subsequent purchasers took good or defeasible title and whether ratification upon majority was required. The writ itself may be obsolete, but the underlying infancy-voidability doctrine carried forward into modern contract and property law in modified form.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the core working definition: the writ lay when an infant had made a feoffment in fee, a grant for life, or a gift in tail, and could be sued out after the infant reached full age. Bouvier notes the writ's abolition under 3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 27, and correctly identifies the coexisting self-help remedy — the right of entry during minority — citing Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium* at 193 and Coke on Littleton at 247 and 337. These citations point researchers to the two most authoritative primary sources on the writ's operation.
Older common law dictionaries and treatise literature (Termes de la Ley, Rastell, Jacob's Law Dictionary) also list this writ in the context of real actions and infancy, generally in agreement with Bouvier on the mechanics. The consensus is that the writ was a remedial real action, curative of a defect caused by the incapacity of the grantor at the time of alienation. No significant divergence exists among the historical sources on the writ's basic function, though the earlier sources are more elaborate on the procedural distinctions between the writ and the entry remedy.
What historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the relationship between *dum fuit infra etatem* and the broader category of personal disability defenses in real actions — a gap that matters for researchers trying to situate the writ within the full taxonomy of common law real property remedies.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ is a product of English common law and was formally abolished in England in 1833. Its direct procedural form was never widely adopted in American jurisdictions, most of which inherited the voidability principle for infant contracts and conveyances but dispensed with the formal real action machinery. American researchers encountering the term will find it primarily in treatises and commentaries explaining inherited English doctrine rather than in operative American pleading records.