Definition
Meindre age is a Law French term meaning minority or lesser age — the condition of being under the age of legal majority. In historical English and early American law, a person in meindre age lacked full legal capacity: they could not sue or be sued in their own name without a guardian, could not enter binding contracts, and were subject to various protections and disabilities that the common law attached to the status of infancy or minority. The term is purely historical and carries no operative legal force in modern practice; contemporary law addresses the same concept through the terms "minority," "infancy," and "legal age."
Common Confusion
Meindre age and infancy were used interchangeably in historical sources but carry slightly different registers. "Infancy" was the dominant common law term of art for the legal status of persons under majority, with well-developed doctrines attached to it (voidable contracts, tort capacity, guardianship). "Meindre age" appears more often as a descriptive phrase — literally glossing the condition — than as a term with its own body of doctrine. Researchers encountering meindre age in historical pleadings or records should map it directly onto infancy doctrine. The two terms also share the same definitional ambiguity: the precise age of majority varied by context (21 for most purposes, lower for certain acts) and is not fixed by the phrase itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Meindre age is a marker term in Law French legal materials, meaning its appearance in a historical document signals the document's approximate date range and tradition. Law French survived in English legal pleading and reporting well into the seventeenth century, and terms like meindre age appear in Year Books, early plea rolls, and abridgements. Researchers working in those sources should recognize the phrase without treating it as a technical term distinct from "minority" or "infancy."
The more practical research point: when meindre age appears in a document, the surrounding context almost always concerns one of a small cluster of legal questions — guardianship, the validity of a transaction entered by a minor, inheritance and descent, or the tolling of a limitations period. Each of these has its own developed body of doctrine indexed under different headings in historical legal encyclopedias and digests. The phrase itself is rarely the entry point; it is a flag directing researchers toward those substantive doctrines.
Note also that the age of majority was not uniform across historical legal contexts. Minority for purposes of real property transactions, marriage, criminal responsibility, and military service were each governed by different rules. Meindre age, as a general phrase, does not specify which threshold applies. Researchers must look to the substantive context of the instrument or proceeding to determine which age rule governs.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill — give the same compact definition: Law French for "minority; lesser age," citing Kelham's glossary of Norman and Old French legal terms as the authority. The entries are in substantial agreement, and none attempts to develop doctrine from the phrase. Black's 2nd edition folds in the adjacent entry MEINY/MEINE/MEINIE (the royal household or retinue) immediately following, which is an unrelated term sharing only the Law French root.
The brevity of these entries reflects the term's actual status in legal literature: it is a gloss, not a doctrinal concept. Historical dictionaries of this period routinely catalogued Law French vocabulary not because the terms carried independent legal weight in contemporary practice but as an aid to reading older sources. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries accordingly — as a translation note, not as authority for the legal rules governing minority.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide, and what researchers must seek elsewhere: the substantive common law doctrine of infancy, which was extensively developed in Blackstone's Commentaries (Book I, Ch. 17), in Coke on Littleton, and in the equity treatises on guardianship.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Infancy — Age of Criminal Responsibility (criminal_135)
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia: Marriage — Capacity to Marry (Age, Consanguinity, Affinity) (family_2)