Definition
An archaic legal term designating a person who was not a Christian — specifically, an infidel or unbeliever. The term appears in early English legal texts to identify individuals whose religious status placed them outside the full protections and privileges of the common law, at a time when religious conformity was intertwined with legal standing and the capacity to take oaths.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in standard modern use. The term is effectively absent from contemporary English outside historical and theological contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined, though the concept of an infidel or unbeliever as a legally and socially distinct class was well understood in earlier centuries.
Editorial note: The term has no meaningful modern common counterpart. Its force was not merely descriptive — in the historical legal context, being classified as a mescroyant carried real procedural consequences, particularly around oath-taking and testimonial competence, that no modern term for unbeliever replicates.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus should treat it as a marker of period-specific legal disability rather than a mere religious label.
The practical legal consequence of the classification was significant: common law courts historically required witnesses to take oaths, and an oath was understood to have binding force only if the swearer believed in divine punishment for perjury. A mescroyant — lacking that belief in the Christian sense — was therefore deemed incompetent to testify or, in some formulations, to access certain legal remedies. This connection between religious belief and testimonial competence persisted in English law well past the medieval period and did not dissolve entirely until the nineteenth century with the passage of legislation permitting affirmations and broadening testimonial competency.
Researchers should not assume the term was applied with precision or consistency across sources. "Infidel" and "mescroyant" overlap substantially in the historical record but do not always map identically. Bouvier's bare entry ("an unbeliever") signals that by the mid-nineteenth century American legal context the term was already a curiosity rather than an operative legal category. When encountered in a primary source, the surrounding procedural context — particularly concerning oaths, witness competency, or land tenure — will clarify how the classification was being deployed.
The term also appears at the intersection of canon and common law traditions. Ecclesiastical courts had their own frameworks for treating non-Christians, and early common law borrowed heavily from that vocabulary. Sources that blend these traditions may use mescroyant in ways that do not map cleanly onto purely secular legal doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in complete agreement and offer nearly identical minimal definitions: a mescroyant is a term from the ancient books designating an infidel or unbeliever. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's differ only in the level of framing, with Black's adding the qualifier "ancient books" to signal obsolescence and Bouvier's presenting the definition even more economically.
None of the source dictionaries elaborate on the legal consequences that attached to this classification, which is a meaningful omission. The definition as given identifies the term but does not explain why it mattered legally — leaving researchers without guidance on the testimonial competency doctrine or the oath-taking regime that gave the classification its force. That gap is a limitation of the historical dictionaries, not a reflection of the term's historical insignificance.
No meaningful divergence exists among the sources; the convergence itself confirms that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the term was already treated as an antiquarian entry rather than an active legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is native to English legal history and has no distinct American doctrinal development. In U.S. legal history, the underlying concern — testimonial competency of non-Christians — was addressed through statutory reform rather than through this terminology, making mescroyant essentially absent from American primary sources.