Definition
An assault committed against a person who inhabits the same dwelling as the assailant. The term derives from Saxon law and describes a category of wrongful violence distinguished by its domestic setting — the victim and offender share a residence at the time of the attack.
Common Confusion
INFIHT should not be confused with HAMSOCN (also spelled hamsoken), a related Saxon concept describing the act of breaking into a person's home to commit an assault. Hamsocn emphasizes the breach of the dwelling's security; infiht emphasizes the assault occurring within shared domestic quarters. Both terms survive in Anglo-Saxon legal scholarship and in early common law digests, but they address distinct wrongs. Researchers encountering either term in historical sources should not treat them as synonyms.
Why It Matters in Research
Infiht is an archaic Saxon legal term with no living common law counterpart. It will appear almost exclusively in historical sources — Anglo-Saxon codes, early medieval digests, and derivative scholarship drawing on those materials. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in any operative legal document produced after the Norman Conquest reshaped English law's vocabulary and conceptual framework.
The term's primary research value is taxonomic: it reveals how early English law distinguished between types of assault based on the relationship between parties and the domestic setting of the violence, anticipating later common law distinctions between assault in public and assault within the home. This sensitivity to domestic context is worth noting for researchers tracing the historical roots of concepts such as domestic violence, curtilage, or the sanctity of the dwelling.
One navigational trap: the term appears in Black's Law Dictionary amid unrelated entries (including fragments about the maxim *Infinitum in jure reprobatur* and references to "information and belief"), reflecting the compressed, sometimes irregular typesetting of early dictionary editions. Researchers working with digitized or OCR-rendered versions of those dictionaries should verify that surrounding text belongs to separate entries and not to the infiht definition itself. The apparent conflation in the Black's source material is an artifact of page layout, not substantive connection.
Because infiht has no modern statutory or case law application, researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a marker of Saxon or early Anglo-Norman legal context, useful for dating a document or identifying its legal tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary — are in agreement on the core definition: infiht is a Saxon term for an assault on a person sharing the same dwelling. Burrill cites Wharton's *Lexicon* as its authority, which is appropriate given that Wharton's legal lexicon was a standard bridge source for archaic and Saxon terms in nineteenth-century English legal scholarship.
Neither edition of Black's nor Burrill offers elaboration on the legal consequences of infiht under Saxon law — what penalties attached, how it was prosecuted, or how it related to the broader Saxon peace system. This is a genuine gap in the historical dictionary record. Researchers seeking that depth should consult primary scholarship on Anglo-Saxon law directly, including Thorpe's *Ancient Laws and Institutes of England* or Attenborough's *Laws of the Earliest English Kings*, rather than relying on dictionary sources alone.
The second edition of Black's entry is fragmentary in the available source material, but aligns with the first edition's definition without substantive revision.
Jurisdictional Note
Infiht is a term of Saxon English law with no recognized equivalent in Scots law, Irish Brehon law, or any American legal tradition. It has no jurisdictional application in modern research outside of historical and comparative legal contexts.