Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning excommunicated — that is, formally excluded from the communion and sacraments of the church by ecclesiastical authority. In medieval English law, excommunication carried civil as well as spiritual consequences: a person declared excommenge could be disabled from maintaining certain legal actions or proceedings in the royal courts until the church ban was lifted. The term appears in early common law texts as a status designation rather than a procedural term, identifying a party whose ecclesiastical standing affected their legal capacity.
Common Confusion
EXCOMMENGE should not be confused with outlawry. Both statuses could disable a person from the courts, and historical sources occasionally treat them together, but they arose from entirely different sources of authority. Outlawry was a sentence of the royal courts; excommunication was a sentence of ecclesiastical courts. The civil disabilities attached to each operated through distinct mechanisms, and a person could theoretically be subject to both simultaneously.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records — plea rolls, Chancery proceedings, and early treatise literature — and rarely anywhere else. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a status marker affecting procedural capacity, not a substantive offense.
The key research trap is assuming the term is merely theological. In the period when this term was in active use, excommunication had enforceable civil consequences under English law. A court could stay proceedings against a party, or deny a party access to the courts, based on their ecclesiastical status. Royal writs of significavit and de excommunicato capiendo were the machinery by which the royal government enforced church sentences. Researchers tracking a party described as excommenge who then disappears from a litigation record should look for evidence of these writs or for a certificate of absolution before the party reappears.
The variant spelling escumenge (noted in Burrill as the older form) reflects the normal phonetic drift of Law French across the 13th and 14th centuries. Searching historical corpora for one spelling without the other will produce incomplete results. Additional variant forms may appear in manuscript sources. Cross-referencing the Confirmatio Cartarum citation (25 Edward I) can help calibrate the dating of the term's usage.
Researchers should also note that the civil consequences of excommunication were progressively curtailed in English law over the 16th and 17th centuries as the relationship between ecclesiastical and royal jurisdiction was renegotiated. By the later common law period, excommunication had lost most of its capacity to affect proceedings in the royal courts. The term effectively becomes a dead letter in legal usage after that transition, which means its appearance in a source is itself a useful dating signal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source providing a definition. Burrill identifies the term as Law French, glosses it as the Latin excommunicatus, notes the older spelling escumenge, and anchors it with citations to Littleton's Tenures (section 201) and Coke on Littleton (133b) — both foundational common law authorities — as well as a documentary reference to the Confirmatio Cartarum under Edward I.
No competing or diverging definition is available from other historical dictionaries in the current source set. Burrill's treatment is brief but precise: it supplies the linguistic lineage, the alternative spelling, and the core references without elaborating on the civil disabilities. Researchers wanting a fuller treatment of the legal consequences of excommunication in English law will need to go beyond the dictionary to the treatise literature, particularly Coke's Institutes and the relevant sections of Blackstone's Commentaries on ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to medieval and early modern English law and its interaction with ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It has no operative meaning in modern common law systems. Analogous concepts in civil law or canon law traditions will appear under different terminology.