Definition
A Latin term of medieval legal usage meaning to put to flight or to drive away. In historical common law contexts, infugare describes the act of causing a person to flee — typically in the sense of forcing someone into flight through pursuit, threat, or force. The term appears in older pleading records and criminal law discussions, particularly in connection with matters of flight, outlawry, and the legal consequences that attached to a person who fled from justice or from the scene of an alleged crime.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker rather than a living legal concept. Researchers will encounter infugare almost exclusively in pre-modern sources — medieval Year Books, early common law treatises, and Latin pleadings — where flight by an accused carried significant legal weight. Under early English criminal law, flight was treated as a form of implied guilt and could trigger outlawry proceedings. The act of causing another to flee (infugare) could therefore be legally significant in establishing whether flight occurred voluntarily or was induced.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry clusters infugare alongside unrelated Latin terms (infula, inge, ingenium), which is characteristic of that dictionary's compressed alphabetical formatting rather than any substantive connection between the terms. Researchers should not read legal relationships into adjacent entries in that source.
The case references appearing in the Rapalje & Lawrence entry — cited loosely in the source text — relate to surrounding entries and should not be assumed to stand as authority for infugare itself without independent verification. Treat the Rapalje & Lawrence citation block with caution; the compressed formatting of that dictionary frequently produces ambiguous attribution across multiple headwords.
For corpus researchers working in Law Mind, infugare will surface most reliably in Latin legal glossaries, early criminal law materials, and ecclesiastical or admiralty records where Latin pleading survived longest. It is unlikely to appear in American or post-eighteenth-century English sources except as a historical gloss.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core translation: to put to flight. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) offer nothing beyond this bare translation, treating infugare as a term requiring no further elaboration — which itself reflects how marginal the term had become by the time those editions were compiled (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Rapalje & Lawrence matches but also contributes nothing additional by way of legal context, despite its general tendency toward more expansive treatment of Latin terms.
None of the historical dictionaries situate infugare within the doctrine of flight and outlawry where it would have had its greatest practical relevance, nor do they distinguish its usage across ecclesiastical, common law, and admiralty contexts. Researchers seeking the substantive legal history behind the concept of flight must look beyond these dictionary entries to sources such as Bracton, Fleta, or Blackstone's Commentaries on the treatment of flight and fugitives.
Jurisdictional Note
As an archaic Latin term drawn from early English common law, infugare has no active jurisdictional application in modern American, English, or Commonwealth legal systems. Its relevance is confined to historical legal research across any jurisdiction that inherited or studied the English common law tradition.