Definition
A Latin term from medieval and early modern law meaning that a person — typically a son or other dependent — has been placed outside the family household and thereby separated from the legal and economic unit of the family. The term is functionally equivalent to *forisfamiliatus*: one who has been "put out of the family," either by the father's act of emancipation, by the establishment of a separate household, or by some formal severance of the familial bond recognized by law. The effect of this status was to extinguish or alter the dependent's claim to share in the father's estate under rules governing inheritance among children still within the household, and to affect the legal capacity of the individual to act independently.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears rarely in primary sources and almost never in modern legal writing. Researchers encountering it in medieval or early modern texts — particularly in inheritance disputes, feudal tenure records, or ecclesiastical documents — should treat it as a direct synonym for *forisfamiliatus* and redirect their research to that term, which carries the fuller documentary record and more substantial treatment in historical sources. Burrill himself signals this by citing Spelman and immediately cross-referencing *forisfamiliatus*, indicating the term had no independent doctrinal life even by the time legal dictionaries were being compiled. The practical risk in research is spending time tracing *extrafamiliatus* through indexes when all substantive authority lives under the other form. In Latin-language legal manuscripts and Year Book-era materials, variant spellings and synonym terms of this kind are common; the Latin prefix *extra-* (outside) and *foris-* (out of, beyond) were used interchangeably to express the same concept of exclusion from the family unit.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment located in the Law Mind corpus, and it is brief: the entry defines *extrafamiliatus* as "the same with forisfamiliatus" and cites Spelman's *Glossarium Archaeologicum* as authority. This cross-referencing treatment confirms that the term was understood by legal lexicographers as a variant rather than a distinct legal concept. Spelman's Glossarium is a seventeenth-century glossary of archaic and medieval legal terms, making this a doubly historical source — a reference work pointing back to medieval practice. No independent doctrinal development of *extrafamiliatus* appears in the historical dictionary record; its entire legal content is held within the *forisfamiliatus* entry. Researchers should not expect to find common law court treatment of the term by this name.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forisfamiliatus; Family and Household in Medieval Law; Emancipation (Historical)