Definition
A Latin legal term from old European law meaning to be adjudged to the public treasury; to be seized for and forfeited to the fiscal authority of the state. The term describes the act or condition of property being confiscated — taken from a private holder and transferred to sovereign ownership through legal process or judgment. It is the passive legal condition of undergoing confiscation: to be infiscated is to be made the property of the fisc.
Common Language
No common English counterpart exists. The term is pure Latin legal jargon specific to medieval and early modern European legal writing. It has no meaningful presence in ordinary English usage, historical or modern, outside of legal and scholarly contexts. Researchers encountering it in source texts can treat it as a technical term of art requiring no comparison to lay usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears primarily in Latin legal texts, glossaries, and treatises from old European — particularly continental — legal traditions. Researchers working with medieval English, Roman, or canon law sources will encounter it in discussions of forfeiture, attainder, and fiscal prerogative. Several traps warrant attention.
First, the term operates at the intersection of Roman fiscal law and medieval customary practice. Its meaning is stable across sources, but its procedural context varies significantly: in Roman law, infiscari typically followed a judicial judgment; in some medieval European systems, confiscation to the fisc could occur by administrative or sovereign act without formal judicial process. The distinction matters when tracing whether a historical source is describing a legal judgment or an executive seizure.
Second, researchers should not conflate infiscari with simple forfeiture to a lord or local authority. The fisc (fiscus) specifically denotes the imperial or royal treasury — the central sovereign's financial interest — as opposed to a local lord's treasury or a municipal fund. Sources using infiscari are always describing a transfer to that central sovereign power.
Third, the term will appear in citation chains back to Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum and similar early modern legal antiquarian works. When Burrill cites Spelman in this context, researchers should understand that the authority chain runs through early modern reconstruction of medieval Latin usage, not through a continuous line of common law adjudication. These glossarial sources are descriptive and philological, not judicial.
Finally, researchers cross-referencing confiscation in Anglo-American common law will find that the common law tradition developed its own vocabulary — forfeiture, attainder, escheat — rather than importing infiscari directly. The term's presence in an English-language legal source is almost always a signal that the author is working from Roman or continental sources, or engaging in comparative legal analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines it concisely and accurately: confiscation to the public treasury, with the Latin equivalents fisco adjudicari (to be adjudged to the treasury) and in fiscum rapi (to be seized into the treasury). He attributes the authority to Spelman, whose Glossarium Archaeologicum is the expected reference for this class of medieval Latin legal terms.
No divergence or ambiguity exists across historical sources for this term — the meaning is narrow and consistent. What historical sources collectively do not address is the procedural mechanism that triggered infiscari in any given jurisdiction or period. Burrill and Spelman both treat the term as definitional rather than analytical, leaving the question of when and how confiscation to the fisc was lawfully invoked to be answered from the primary texts themselves.
Researchers should note that Spelman's Glossarium, while an indispensable reference for medieval Latin legal terms, reflects seventeenth-century English antiquarian scholarship. Its reconstructions of continental and medieval usage are generally reliable but should be verified against primary sources when the distinction between Roman, Frankish, feudal, or English fiscal practice is legally significant.
Jurisdictional Note
Infiscari is a term of old European law, not English common law. It appears in Roman law and its derivatives, medieval continental systems, and canon law contexts. Anglo-American common law jurisdictions addressed comparable subject matter through the distinct doctrines of forfeiture and escheat. Researchers should not assume that the term carries precedential weight in any common law jurisdiction.