Definition
A Latin adjective meaning large, broad, or comprehensive, used in medieval and early modern legal instruments to describe the scope or reach of a legal obligation or grant. In English legal practice, largus appears most prominently in the classification of warranties in conveyancing, where a warranty could be characterized as larga (broad), largior (broader), or largissima (broadest), depending on the class of persons bound by the warrantor's obligation and entitled to its benefit.
The gradations function as a scale of comprehensiveness:
1. LARGA: A warranty running to a specified person and that person's heirs — the baseline broad form.
2. LARGIOR: A warranty extending to the grantee, the grantee's heirs, and the grantee's assigns and the heirs of those assigns — broader in scope.
3. LARGISSIMA: The most expansive form, extending to the grantee, heirs, assigns, heirs of assigns, and the assigns of assigns and their heirs — the widest possible chain of obligation.
The term operates in contrast to stricta (strict or narrow), which describes a warranty limited in its coverage of persons or subject matter.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not independently listed in English; the Latin root largus is recognized as the ancestor of English "large," "largess," and related words, conveying abundance or generosity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's does not list largus as an English entry; "large" derives from it, carrying the sense of ample, extensive, or generous in scope.
The gap between common and legal meaning is subtle but worth noting. In ordinary language, "large" suggests physical size or quantity. In the legal documents where largus appears, the term is a term of art describing juridical reach — specifically, the range of persons across whom a warranty obligation travels through succession and assignment. A largissima warranty is not "very large" in any spatial sense; it is maximally comprehensive in its chain of legal obligation.
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Common Confusion
Largus is occasionally encountered by researchers who expect it to be merely a synonym for the ordinary adjective "large" appearing as descriptive filler in a Latin instrument. It is not. When largus (or larga, largior, largissima) appears in a warranty clause, it is a technical term of conveyancing art that signals the drafter's intentional classification of the warranty's scope. Misreading it as rhetorical amplification, rather than as a legal category, will cause the researcher to miss the operative meaning of the clause entirely.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern conveyancing records, plea rolls, or treatises on real property will encounter the largus/stricta taxonomy primarily in the context of warranty clauses in feoffments, deeds of grant, and related instruments. Several navigational points apply:
First, the gradations larga/largior/largissima are not merely stylistic variants. They carry substantive legal consequences about who may voucher the warrantor and who is bound to warrant. A researcher analyzing a medieval or early modern deed must identify which form of warranty was employed to understand the obligations created.
Second, the primary English-language legal authority for this taxonomy is Cowell's Interpreter, to which Burrill explicitly attributes the passage reproducing the three grades. Researchers unable to locate discussion of largus in case law or later treatise literature should look to Cowell and to Coke on Littleton for the treatment of warranty classification in the common law tradition.
Third, because largus is a Latin term appearing in instruments drafted before full anglicization of legal pleading and conveyancing, it will be found most densely in sources from the medieval period through the seventeenth century. Post-Statute of Frauds instruments increasingly replaced Latin warranty clauses with English-language equivalents, so the term largely disappears from practice documents after the late seventeenth century. Its presence in a document can itself serve as a rough dating signal.
Fourth, researchers using historical indexes or digests organized by English subject headings may find largus-related material indexed under "Warranty" or "Conveyance" rather than under the Latin term itself. Cross-referencing both entry points is advisable.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the principal English legal dictionary treatment, reproducing the Cowell passage that lays out all three grades of warranty comprehensiveness. The entry is valuable precisely because it preserves the comparative Latin grammar (larga / largior / largissima) that makes the taxonomy explicit.
No other major historical English law dictionary (Termes de la Ley, Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's) provides a discrete entry for largus as a technical term, which reflects the word's status as background Latin vocabulary rather than a term requiring standalone definition in practitioners' reference works. Researchers relying solely on those dictionaries would not find a direct entry and must instead work through "Warranty" as the organizing concept.
The Latin dictionary tradition (going back to classical usage) confirms that largus in its root sense means abundant or copious, and was used in agricultural and poetic contexts to describe generous quantities. The legal adaptation narrows this general sense of abundance into a precise juridical concept of scope.
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Jurisdictional Note
The largus taxonomy of warranty is a feature of the English common law of real property and is transmitted most clearly through English conveyancing practice and the treatise tradition. Scots law and civil law systems classify warranty obligations differently and do not employ this specific Latin gradation. American colonial and early national conveyancing, which drew heavily on English forms, may reproduce the terminology in early instruments, but American warranty doctrine quickly developed its own English-language vocabulary.
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