Definition
A person who breaks through — specifically, one who commits burglary by forcible entry. The term is a Latinate legal designation for a burglar or housebreaker, drawn from classical and juridical Latin and carried into English legal usage primarily through scholarly and ecclesiastical sources. In practice, effractor appears as a term of art in older indictments, legal treatises, and glossaries rather than in common pleading or statute.
Common Confusion
Effractor and burglar are functionally synonymous in historical sources, but they are not perfectly interchangeable in research. Burglar is the operative English common law term with a defined technical meaning — breaking and entering a dwelling house of another in the nighttime with intent to commit a felony. Effractor is the Latin equivalent used in formal or learned legal writing. A researcher encountering effractor in a historical document should not assume the drafter intended all elements of the common law burglary definition; the Latin term was sometimes used more loosely to mean any forcible breaker. Rapalje & Lawrence further note the distinct sense of prison breaker (citing Spelman's Glossary), which could describe someone breaking out of confinement rather than breaking into premises — a meaning that burglar does not carry.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: straightforward single-meaning term with historical and Latin source depth.
Researchers will encounter effractor almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century legal documents — medieval and early modern Latin records, ecclesiastical court proceedings, learned commentaries, and glossaries such as Cowell's Interpreter and Spelman's Glossarium. The term rarely appears in English common law pleading because English courts pleaded burglary in English (or in Anglicized Latin forms that tracked the common law definition). When effractor does appear in a document, it is a signal that the source is either heavily Latinate in style or drawing on civilian or ecclesiastical legal tradition rather than common law.
The Digest citations in the Latin sources (Dig. 1, 15, 3 and 47, 17, 1) connect effractor to Roman law — specifically to provisions on night watchmen and urban security and on theft by housebreakers. This Roman law genealogy matters: a document using effractor may be invoking a civilian legal framework, not a common law one, and the elements and consequences attached to the offense may differ accordingly.
Rapalje & Lawrence's additional gloss — prison breakers, citing Spelman — introduces a secondary meaning that Black's and Bouvier's omit entirely. A researcher transcribing or indexing historical records should note which sense is intended: breaking into premises (burglary sense) or breaking out of custody (prison breach sense). Context will usually clarify, but the ambiguity is real and the historical dictionaries are inconsistent on the point.
The term has no modern statutory life in American or English law. It does not appear in the Model Penal Code, the common law burglary statutes, or modern criminal codes. Its research value is purely historical and interpretive.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: effractor means one who breaks through and one who commits burglary. The definitions are word-for-word identical across these sources, suggesting a common ancestor — almost certainly Cowell's Interpreter or a similar early modern legal glossary. None of these sources engage with the Roman law background or the prison-breaking alternative sense.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the most useful of the shelf sources for research purposes. It is the only one to attribute the term explicitly to Cowell and to flag the prison-breaker sense via Spelman. That double attribution points researchers toward the two primary English-language glossarists who transmitted Latinate legal vocabulary into early modern common law scholarship.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the civilian law context supplied by the Digest citations, the distinction between breaking into and breaking out, and any guidance on how the term functioned in actual pleading as opposed to scholarly writing. Researchers relying solely on the dictionary shelf will get the definition but not the interpretive framework needed to deploy it accurately in historical document analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
Effractor has no jurisdiction-specific legal meaning in American law. It appears as a historical term of art across English and Scottish legal sources without meaningful variation by jurisdiction. Any jurisdictional difference in the underlying offense of burglary should be researched under that term, not this one.