Definition
A Latin term from the civil and old English law denoting a robber or thief. The word appears in historical legal texts to describe one who takes property by force or stealth. Though the historical sources list both meanings together, the term carried the primary sense of a violent taker — closer to robber than mere thief — reflecting usage in Roman law and its reception into early English legal writing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general English use. The term is archaic and appears today only in historical, ecclesiastical, or scholarly contexts, where it may be translated loosely as "robber" or "bandit."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered. The term was already obsolete in general English by the nineteenth century.
The gap worth noting: Because latro survives in English only in scholarly translations of Latin texts, a researcher encountering it in an old pleading or treatise may not recognize it as a term of legal art at all, let alone understand whether it was being used in the stricter Roman sense of armed robber or the looser sense of thief generally.
Common Confusion
Latro is sometimes read interchangeably with fur (the civil law term for a thief who takes by stealth). Roman law drew a meaningful distinction: fur described covert taking, while latro described open, often violent taking. The conflation in English legal sources — where both "robber" and "thief" appear as translations — reflects a loosening of that distinction as the term migrated from Roman texts into medieval English legal writing. Researchers should not assume the two terms were treated as synonyms in the original civil law sources they are consulting.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a research hazard rather than a living legal concept. It appears in medieval English legal records, in translations of the Digest, and in early treatises such as Fleta, but it did not develop a sustained doctrinal career in common law. A researcher working with early English criminal records or with civil law materials transplanted into English legal writing may encounter latro as a descriptive label for a defendant without any accompanying doctrinal weight.
The Digest citation (Dig. 50.16.118) is a definitional passage — the Roman jurists were themselves clarifying what latro meant — which signals that even in the civil law the term required interpretive effort. Researchers using Fleta or similar early English treatises should treat latro as the author's civil law vocabulary, not as evidence that English law had adopted a Roman law category of offense.
Because the term had no fixed procedural consequence in English law (unlike, say, felony or mayhem), encountering it in a historical document tells you something about the drafter's learning and sources more than about the precise charge or legal theory at issue.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — are in complete agreement, differing only in minor typographical details. All three define latro as "a robber" and secondarily "a thief," and all three cite the same two authorities: Digest 50.16.118 and Fleta, lib. 1, c. 38, § 1. The uniformity is itself informative: none of the dictionaries attempt to develop the term, distinguish its civil law from its English law usage, or trace any doctrinal development. It is entered, essentially, as a vocabulary gloss for readers who might encounter it in a Latin source.
What the historical dictionaries miss: they do not flag the fur/latro distinction from Roman law, nor do they explain why the term appears in Fleta specifically — a point that would help researchers understand the scope of its English reception. A researcher relying solely on these entries would know what the word means in translation but not how to weight it when it appears in a primary source.
Jurisdictional Note
Latro is not a term in active use in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance is confined to Roman law sources and to medieval English legal texts written in Latin. Researchers in Scottish legal history may also encounter it in early Scots Latin records, where it carries similar meaning.