Definition
In historical English law, "nastre" is a Law French term meaning "born." The term appears almost exclusively in the compound phrase *fols nastres* — literally "born fools" — used to describe persons who were idiots from birth, as distinguished from those who lost their mental faculties later in life. The distinction carried legal consequence: a person classified as a *fol nastre* was understood to have never possessed legal capacity, whereas a person who became mentally incapacitated after birth (a lunatic) might have lucid intervals and thus retain some degree of legal standing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term does not exist in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term is Law French, not general English vocabulary.
The word derives from the same root as the English "nascent" and the French *naître* (to be born), but it never entered the common English lexicon. It is purely a term of historical legal art and requires no gap analysis between legal and lay usage — there is no lay usage to compare against.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate *fols nastres* with the broader medieval category of *non compos mentis*, which encompassed several distinct classes of persons lacking mental capacity, including lunatics, those who became incapacitated by illness or accident, and drunkards. *Fols nastres* refers specifically to the congenital subset — what later legal tradition would call "idiots" in the technical legal sense (persons without capacity from birth), as opposed to "lunatics" (persons who had capacity and lost it). The idiot/lunatic distinction was foundational to Crown prerogative over the persons and estates of those lacking mental capacity, and collapsing the categories in historical research will produce errors.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface only in sources engaging directly with early English legal texts, particularly Britton, which is the primary surviving authority cited in connection with *fols nastres*. Researchers encountering the term in manuscript sources, Year Books, or transcriptions of medieval legal records should recognize it immediately as a status designation with jurisdictional consequences: the Crown, through the Court of Wards and later the Lord Chancellor, exercised distinct prerogative powers over idiots and lunatics respectively.
The term is essentially inert in post-medieval legal writing. By the time of Blackstone, the language had shifted to "idiot" and "lunatic" in English, and the Law French vocabulary had fallen away. Any appearance of *nastre* or *fols nastres* in a corpus source signals either a medieval text, a direct quotation from or gloss on such a text, or an antiquarian legal dictionary entry. It is not a term a researcher will encounter in modern legal drafting or judicial opinions.
Researchers working on the history of legal capacity, guardianship, or the parens patriae doctrine will find *fols nastres* relevant as a historical antecedent. The distinction between congenital and acquired incapacity encoded in this term is the conceptual ancestor of distinctions that persist, in different form, in modern mental capacity and guardianship law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary entry identified for this term. Burrill correctly identifies *nastre* as Law French for "born," glosses *fols nastres* as "born fools" or "idiots from birth," and cites Britton, chapter 34, as the authority. The entry is terse, as is appropriate for a term whose usage was narrow and whose legal significance lies entirely in its historical context.
No entry appears in other standard historical law dictionaries surveyed. The term's absence from Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's, and Bouvier's reflects both the term's archaism and its displacement by English equivalents well before those dictionaries were compiled. Burrill, writing with a broader historical reach, captured it; later American dictionaries did not.
Britton, the Anglo-Norman legal treatise from the late thirteenth century presented as a royal pronouncement, remains the primary source for the term in legal usage. Researchers who need to go beyond the dictionary entry should consult Britton directly.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to the legal tradition of medieval England and has no independent existence in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is entirely historical. Researchers in comparative or historical legal contexts outside England should treat it as a foreign-language term of English legal art requiring translation rather than a term with domestic application.