Definition
An archaic Law French term denoting a household or family — specifically, the group of persons dwelling under one roof and supported by the head of the household. The term encompasses not only blood relations but all persons dependent upon and maintained within the domestic establishment, including servants and others forming part of the domestic unit.
Why It Matters in Research
MEYNPAST is a term a researcher is far more likely to encounter as a gloss or cross-reference than as a primary operative term in a legal instrument. Its significance lies almost entirely in its capacity to unlock related concepts. When encountered in medieval or early common law sources, particularly in Norman French legal texts, it signals a legal context concerned with household liability, lord-vassal relationships, and the obligations that flowed from maintaining dependents. Researchers working in early English land law, villeinage, or seignorial records should treat MEYNPAST as a pointer toward questions of household membership and responsibility rather than a freestanding legal concept with discrete doctrinal content. The term appears in Britton, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal text, and that context should govern interpretation — do not import modern household or family law meanings. Because the term is rendered in Law French, variant spellings are common in manuscript sources, and researchers searching corpus materials should cast a wide net: MEINPAST, MEYNPASTE, and similar forms may appear depending on the scribe and period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: "L. Fr. A household or family. Britt. c. 1. See Manupastus." This is a minimal entry, and Burrill wisely redirects the reader to the Latin cognate MANUPASTUS, which carries the richer doctrinal content in the civil and common law tradition. The reference to Britton (c. 1) anchors the term in the late thirteenth century, when the Norman French legal vocabulary of England was still in active professional use. Historical dictionaries do not materially disagree on the core meaning — there is no recorded controversy about what MEYNPAST denoted — but they are collectively sparse on how the concept functioned operationally. The more productive line of research runs through MANUPASTUS, where the idea of persons "fed by hand" (manu pastus) by a master or householder carried legal weight in questions of responsibility for their acts. Researchers should not expect MEYNPAST to appear in common law reporters with any doctrinal development of its own; it is essentially a vernacular label for a concept the formal legal tradition handled in Latin.
Jurisdictional Note
MEYNPAST is exclusively a term of historical English law derived from the Norman French legal tradition. It has no counterpart in American law and no active doctrinal life in any modern jurisdiction.