Definition
A Law French term meaning an infant or minor — a person of legally insufficient age to exercise full legal capacity. Drawn from the Latin *infans*, the term appears in early English legal writing as a synonym for what later sources consistently call an infant or minor. The compound form *enfaunt dedens age* specifies an infant who is under the age of legal majority, reinforcing that the term carried a technical legal sense, not merely a reference to a young child.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard modern English entry. The word is archaic and does not appear in contemporary general dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had already passed out of ordinary English well before the nineteenth century.
The word's disappearance from common usage makes it a potential trap in historical legal sources: a modern reader encountering *enfaunt* in a transcribed plea roll, abridgment, or early treatise may not immediately recognize it as a technical term of art equivalent to *infant* in the later common law sense — that is, a person below the age of legal majority, not necessarily a very young child.
Common Confusion
*Enfaunt* should not be read as referring exclusively to an infant in the modern colloquial sense of a baby or toddler. In Law French usage, as in subsequent common law usage of *infant*, the term encompasses any person below the age of majority. The narrowing of "infant" to mean a very young child in modern common speech is a post-legal evolution. Researchers working in early sources must hold the broader legal meaning firmly in mind.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in Law French sources and in works that quote or translate those sources directly. It will surface in Britton, Bracton-era abridgments, and related early English legal texts, but it is essentially absent from post-Norman legal writing that had shifted to Latin or to anglicized legal terminology. Researchers will encounter it primarily when working with pre-fifteenth-century materials or with dictionaries and glossaries that catalog Law French vocabulary.
The phrase *enfaunt dedens age* is particularly notable because it suggests that *enfaunt* alone may have carried some ambiguity — that a qualifying phrase was sometimes needed to confirm the person was still within the protected status of minority. Researchers tracing the early development of infancy doctrine, legal capacity, and guardian-ward relationships should treat this term as an entry point into a cluster of Law French concepts (including *garde*, *wardship*, and *nonage*) that underlie the later common law framework.
No direct statutory or common law doctrine survives under this label. Its research value is lexical and historical rather than doctrinal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise. He identifies the Law French origin, supplies the Latin root, cites Britton as the primary authority, and distinguishes the base form from the compound *enfaunt dedens age*. The Britton citations (chapters 54, 107, and 126) are traceable to the thirteenth-century treatise attributed to Edward I's reign, confirming the term's period of active use.
Burrill does not discuss the term's relationship to broader infancy doctrine or its procedural implications — a gap consistent with his general approach to Law French entries, which tend toward identification and translation rather than extended legal analysis. No other source dictionary in the present collection covers *enfaunt*, which places Burrill as the sole historical authority on record here. Researchers requiring deeper treatment must go directly to Britton or to specialized Law French glossaries such as those compiled by Kelham or Rastell.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the English common law tradition as it developed from Norman legal vocabulary. It has no independent life in civil law or Scottish legal sources.