NUICTANTER - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

NUICTANTERAuthored

The Law Mind • 640 words

Definition

A Law French adverbial phrase meaning "by night" or "in the nighttime." Used in early English legal proceedings and pleadings to specify that an act, entry, or wrong was committed under cover of darkness. The term carries no independent legal doctrine of its own; it functioned as a temporal descriptor in pleading, distinguishing nocturnal conduct from acts committed during the day, which could bear on questions of trespass, breaking and entering, or the severity of a wrong.

Why It Matters in Research

NUICTANTER is the kind of term that stops a researcher cold in a medieval Year Book or early common law record. Its sole purpose is temporal specification in pleading, and its appearance signals that the time of an act was legally significant to the case at hand — whether because nocturnal entry aggravated a trespass, because a particular right or procedure turned on daylight versus nighttime conduct, or simply because precise pleading required it.

Researchers working in the Year Books, particularly the Michaelmas term records of Edward III's reign (the citation in Burrill points to Yearb. M. 9 Edw. III. 17), will encounter this term as a routine element of pleading language rather than as a term of art with its own doctrine. The danger is misreading it as a substantive legal concept rather than what it is: a formulaic adverbial qualifier.

The nighttime distinction it encodes, however, was far from trivial in early English law. Certain forms of trespass, burglary, and unlawful entry were treated more harshly when committed nocturnally. The Latin equivalent noctu and the English phrase "by night" appear in parallel sources. When cross-referencing early records, researchers should treat NUICTANTER, noctu, and "by night" as functionally interchangeable descriptors, though their appearance may reflect different scribal or drafting conventions across time periods and courts.

Because the term appears only in Law French sources of the medieval and early modern period, it will not appear in later English or American legal materials. A researcher who encounters it outside a Year Book or comparable primary source of that era should treat the appearance with suspicion.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry economically: "L. Fr. By night." with a single citation to the Year Books of Edward III. This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms — identification of linguistic origin, English equivalent, and one anchoring authority. No other historical dictionary in the standard law library shelf offers an independent entry for NUICTANTER, which reflects how narrowly the term circulated even in the Latin and Law French legal vocabulary of the period.

Burrill's placement of the entry immediately before his treatment of NUISANCE (Nusance) is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement, not conceptual relationship. The proximity has no legal significance.

What historical sources do not address: the practical question of how courts treated the nocturnal character of an act once pleaded via this term — that is, what legal consequences attached to the temporal specification. For that, researchers must look to the surrounding Year Book entries and to treatises on trespass and burglary, not to dictionary sources.

Jurisdictional Note

NUICTANTER is specific to the English common law tradition and its Law French pleading forms. It has no American legal history and does not appear in any recognized American legal context.

NUICTANTERmain

Burrill's Law Dictionary • 1870

L. Fr. By night. Yearb. M. 9 Edw. III. 17. NUISANCE, Nusance. [from L. Fr. noysaunce, nosaunce, (q. v. ;) L. Lat. nocumentum.] Annoyance; any thing that worketh hurt, inconvenience or damage. 3 Bl. Com. 215. Hale's Anal. sect. xlii.- Annoyance done to one's hereditament. Finch's Law, b. 3, c. 2.-Any thing that annoys, incommodes or offends; any thing that renders the enjoyment of life and property uncomfortable. See 9 Co. 58 a, William Aldred's case. Lord Mansfield, 1 Burr. 337. Cowen, J. 5 Hill's (N. Y.) R. 121, 123. See United States Digest, Nuisance. See Common nuisance, Private nuisance. NUISANCE, Assise of. In old practice. A judicial writ directed to the sheriff of the county in which a nuisance existed, in which it was stated that the party injured complained of some particular fact done ad nocumentum liberi tenementi sui, (to the nuisance of his freehold,) and commanding the sheriff to summon an assise, (that is, a jury) to view the premises, and have them at the next commission of assises, that justice might be done, &c. 3 Bl. Com. 221. A writ of nuisance modelled after this assise, has been in occasional use in American practice, but it has been deemed obsolete by the courts, and not encouraged. In modern law, nudum pactum is constantly used to denote a contract without consideration. 2 Bl. Com. 445. 2 Kent's Com. 464. This is founded on the broad terms of the civil law, -(nudum pactum 17 Wendell's R. 441. 1 Denio's R. 436. [or rather nuda pactio] est ubi nulla subest causa præter [propter] conventionem,) without reference to the stricter and technical meaning of the words. Dig. 2. 14. 7. 4. Plowd. 309 a. Broom's Max. 336, [583.] See 1 Spence's Chancery, 186, note (f.) Ex nudo pacto non oritur [nascitur] actio. Out of a naked pact or promise, no action arises. Cod. 2.3.10. Id. 5.14.1. Bract. fol. 99. Fleta, lib. 2, c. 56, § 3. A nudum pactum, in the civil law, afforded no ground for an action, but it might be the subject of an exception or plea; (Nuda pactio obligationem non parit, sed parit exceptionem.) Dig. 2. 14. 7. 4. Heinecc. El. J. C. lib. 3, tit. 14, § 777.