Definition
In old English law, a term denoting a whoremonger or procurer. The word appears in historical English legal records as a designation for a person engaged in the procurement or facilitation of prostitution. It is an archaic term of Latin derivation that found its way into early English legal usage and has no surviving modern counterpart in contemporary law.
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Common Language
This term has no meaningful common English usage, modern or historical. It is pure legal-historical jargon with no civilian counterpart in either Wiktionary or Webster's 1913. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
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Common Confusion
EJECTUS / EJECTMENT: These terms are unrelated. Ejectment is a major common law action for recovery of possession of real property and carries an extensive doctrinal history. EJECTUS is an archaic status descriptor for a person engaged in procuring. The orthographic similarity creates a real indexing and scanning hazard in historical research.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter EJECTUS in glossaries of old English law, in annotated editions of early statutes, or in secondary treatments of medieval and early modern regulation of sexual conduct. Several cautions apply:
First, the term is easily confused with EJECTMENT, a foundational common law action for recovery of land possession. The orthographic similarity is misleading — the two terms share no conceptual relationship. A researcher scanning a historical text or index should not assume EJECTUS is a variant spelling of EJECTMENT.
Second, the sole substantive attribution in the historical dictionaries is to Blount — that is, Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law-Dictionary (1670), one of the earliest English legal dictionaries. Blount is a reliable source for archaic English legal terminology, but his entries are sometimes thin on procedural or statutory context. Researchers should treat this entry as a definitional placeholder rather than a window into a developed body of doctrine.
Third, there is no known statutory framework or case law body built around this specific Latin term. Its presence in legal dictionaries reflects the practice of early lexicographers cataloguing Latin and Norman-French terms encountered in legal manuscripts, not necessarily terms with active doctrinal lives. Researchers looking for historical English law governing prostitution or procuring should pursue that inquiry through statutory history (e.g., early vagrancy statutes, Elizabethan poor law, bawdy house prosecutions) rather than through this term specifically.
Finally, the first edition of Black's provides only the jurisdictional designation "In old English law" with no definition, while the second edition supplies the substantive content via Blount. This is a reminder that across Black's editions, definitions can vary substantially — a first-edition entry should never be assumed to be complete.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The two available sources — the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary — diverge in content. The first edition offers only the jurisdictional tag "In old English law" with no definition supplied. The second edition adds the substance: "A whoremonger. Blount." This pattern is not unusual for obscure Latin terms of limited doctrinal importance, where early editions of Black's served largely as vocabulary inventories drawn from prior glossaries.
The citation to Blount is significant. Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670) was itself heavily indebted to earlier manuscript glossaries and the work of John Cowell (The Interpreter, 1607). Researchers using Law Mind's historical dictionary shelf should note that entries of this type — a single word, a single gloss, a single authority — represent the outer boundary of the historical record rather than a well-developed legal concept. No divergence between sources exists to analyze here, because only one source provides substantive content.
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