Definition
In old English law, miscreauntes (Law French) refers to apostates and unbelievers — persons who had renounced or rejected the Christian faith. The term designated a legal category of persons whose religious status affected their standing before English ecclesiastical and, to some extent, common law courts. As apostates or infidels, miscreauntes occupied a formally degraded legal position in medieval English jurisprudence, where religious orthodoxy bore directly on legal capacity and the availability of certain legal remedies.
Common Confusion
The Burrill entry for miscreauntes appears to contain a printing or compilation error. The definition begins with the correct entry — "apostates; unbelievers" — but then abruptly continues with text plainly belonging to a separate entry on the mesne process writ of capias ad respondendum. Researchers should disregard the second portion of Burrill's entry as a typographical artifact of the source, not as part of the definition of miscreauntes. The two concepts are entirely unrelated.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering miscreauntes in medieval English legal records, writs, or ecclesiastical proceedings should understand that the term is a term of status, not of offense. It does not describe a crime but rather a category of persons — those deemed outside the Christian community, whether through heresy, apostasy, or infidelity — whose legal disabilities flowed from their religious standing.
The term belongs to a cluster of Law French and medieval Latin vocabulary that populated English legal proceedings during the period when ecclesiastical courts exercised broad jurisdiction alongside the royal courts. Miscreauntes could be subject to ecclesiastical censure and civil disabilities affecting property rights, testimonial competency, and access to royal courts. In historical sources, the term may appear in writs, ecclesiastical court rolls, and early common law treatises where the intersection of canon law and English common law is most visible.
Because the term fell out of active legal use well before modern codification, it will not appear in post-medieval statutes or modern case reporters. Researchers should look for it primarily in Year Books, early Chancery records, ecclesiastical court proceedings, and treatises predating the seventeenth century. The Law French form should also alert researchers to the likelihood that surrounding text is similarly archaic and may require cross-reference to glossaries of Law French and Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary.
The Burrill entry is the primary dictionary support available in the Law Mind corpus. Its corrupted state — blending the miscreauntes definition with unrelated mesne process material — illustrates a recurring hazard in working with nineteenth-century law dictionaries that were compiled rapidly from earlier sources: definitions may be truncated, transposed, or merged in ways that obscure meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole Law Mind source covering this term. Burrill correctly identifies miscreauntes as a Law French term and correctly glosses it as apostates and unbelievers in old English law. Beyond that, the entry is compromised by the inclusion of extraneous text concerning mesne process, rendering it unreliable as a complete or accurate statement of the term's legal meaning. No definition from Cowell, Jacob, Termes de la Ley, or other standard historical law dictionaries is available in the current corpus for comparison. Researchers requiring fuller treatment should consult Tomlins' Law Dictionary, Cowell's Interpreter, or Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, which address medieval Law French vocabulary with greater depth than Burrill for terms of this antiquity.
Jurisdictional Note
Miscreauntes is a term specific to medieval English law and its ecclesiastical court system. It has no parallel development in American law, where no established church and no equivalent system of religious-status-based legal disability took root after independence.