Definition
Latin: "within the inn." A term of art from innkeeper liability doctrine describing the moment at which a traveler's goods pass into the legal custody of an innkeeper and the innkeeper's strict liability attaches. Once a guest's baggage or property comes infra hospitium — that is, under the care and within the physical control of the inn — the innkeeper becomes an insurer of that property against loss or damage, subject to recognized exceptions such as the guest's own negligence or acts of God.
The phrase captures both a physical and legal threshold. Property brought onto the inn's premises and received, even constructively, by the innkeeper crosses into a zone of heightened legal responsibility. The innkeeper's liability does not arise from contract alone but from the common law's imposition of a near-absolute duty of safekeeping rooted in public policy concerns about travelers' vulnerability.
Common Confusion
INFRA HOSPITIUM is sometimes loosely equated with mere physical presence on inn premises. The legal meaning is more precise: the property must be under the innkeeper's custody or control, not merely located somewhere nearby. A traveler's horse left in the street outside, or goods left in a vehicle the innkeeper never received, would not necessarily be infra hospitium even if adjacent to the establishment. The phrase also appears in older digests alongside INFRA JURISDICTIONEM ("within the jurisdiction"), a wholly unrelated term; researchers scanning Latin phrase entries should not conflate the two.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is the pivot point in classical innkeeper liability analysis. Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century cases or treatises on bailment and innkeeper law will encounter it as a technical trigger — the moment liability begins rather than a general description of inn premises. Understanding that infra hospitium is a legal threshold, not just a spatial description, is essential for reading older opinions correctly.
The doctrine originates in Calye's Case (1584), which is cited directly by Burrill and remained the leading authority through the nineteenth century. Story on Bailments and Kent's Commentaries both treat the phrase in the context of the innkeeper's common law duty as a near-insurer. Researchers relying on these treatises should note that their framing reflects a stricter liability standard than most modern hotel statutes impose. American jurisdictions progressively replaced or modified the common law infra hospitium rule through innkeeper liability limitation statutes, many enacted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which capped innkeeper exposure upon posting of required notices and providing safes for valuables. The phrase will rarely appear in modern statutory or case law but is indispensable for understanding the historical baseline against which those statutes were written.
Corpus researchers should also watch for the phrase in bailment discussions more broadly — Story's Bailments in particular uses it as an organizing concept. When a nineteenth-century court or treatise writer says liability "attaches when property comes infra hospitium," they are invoking the full weight of the common law strict liability tradition, not merely describing physical location.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries show consistent agreement on the core definition: infra hospitium means "within the inn" and marks the point at which innkeeper liability attaches. Rapalje & Lawrence and both editions of Black's are nearly identical in phrasing, suggesting the definition was well settled by the late nineteenth century and not contested among legal lexicographers.
Burrill's entry is the most historically grounded and the most useful for researchers. He traces the phrase to the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Writs) and identifies Calye's Case in 8 Coke's Reports as the origin of the phrase's doctrinal use. His citation chain — Calye's Case, Smith's Leading Cases, Kent's Commentaries, and Story on Bailments — maps the phrase's trajectory from a Coke-era report through its consolidation in American legal literature. Notably, Burrill observes that the phrase itself was taken from the Register, suggesting it carried formal procedural weight before it became a common law liability rule.
What the historical dictionaries collectively understate is the subsequent statutory modification of the rule. All four sources treat the phrase in its pure common law form. None notes that by the time Black's was published, American state legislatures were actively curtailing the strict liability the phrase had traditionally announced. Researchers should treat these definitions as capturing the common law baseline, not current law.
Jurisdictional Note
Modern innkeeper liability in the United States is largely governed by state statute, and the strict common law infra hospitium standard has been substantially limited in most jurisdictions. Researchers applying historical sources to modern questions should identify the relevant state's innkeeper liability statute before assuming the classical rule applies.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Innkeeper Liability; Bailment.