Definition
In old English law, peregrinatio means pilgrimage. The term appears in medieval legal contexts where a person's physical absence from the realm — specifically for religious travel — could have legal consequences regarding property, obligations, and legal status. A person undertaking a peregrinatio was temporarily outside the ordinary reach of domestic legal proceedings, and the law sometimes recognized this absence as a distinct category with procedural effects.
The term carried weight beyond mere travel. Because pilgrimage was a recognized religious and social institution in medieval England, the law developed specific accommodations and complications around it: questions of whether obligations could be enforced against an absent pilgrim, whether legal proceedings could be initiated or continued, and whether a lord could take custody of a pilgrim's lands during extended absence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A journey, especially a long or meandering one; pilgrimage; wandering through foreign lands.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; the concept appears through "peregrination" — a traveling from place to place; a wandering; a journey, especially through foreign lands.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is one of legal consequence rather than semantic difference. In ordinary usage, peregrinatio simply described travel abroad. In medieval legal usage, it was a term of art that triggered specific procedural and property questions — the journey's religious character and the traveler's temporarily indeterminate legal status gave it meaning the common definition does not capture.
Common Confusion
Peregrinatio should not be confused with the Roman law concept of peregrinus (a foreigner or alien). In Roman law, a peregrinus was a person of non-Roman status permanently subject to different legal treatment. Peregrinatio in old English law describes a temporary condition of absence, not a permanent status of alienage. A researcher encountering peregrinus in Roman law sources and peregrinatio in English medieval sources is dealing with related but distinct legal concepts. The shared Latin root can mislead researchers working across both corpora.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early common law sources. Researchers will encounter it primarily in Latin legal texts, plea rolls, and treatises of the 12th through 14th centuries. Its rarity in later materials means it is unlikely to surface in post-medieval English law sources without explicit historical quotation or scholarly commentary.
The primary trap is anachronism: a researcher reading backward from modern concepts of absence, domicile, or legal disability may over-read the procedural significance of peregrinatio or conflate it with more developed doctrines of legal incapacity. The medieval law's treatment of pilgrims was contextual and uneven — not a systematic doctrine.
Fleta, cited in Burrill, is the key primary source for this term in the English legal tradition. Fleta (c. 1290) is a Latin treatise closely modeled on Bracton, and its reference to peregrinatio appears in the context of discussing categories of persons and their legal standing. Researchers working on this term should have Fleta and Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae available as companion texts.
The term also connects to canon law, where peregrinatio had recognized status as a religious act with its own body of ecclesiastical rules. The intersection of common law and canon law around pilgrimage absence is a productive research space for historians of medieval law but requires careful source separation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief: "In old English law. Pilgrimage. Fleta, lib. 6, c. 8, § 1." This entry does the minimum — it translates the term and pins it to a source. It does not address legal consequence, procedural effect, or the relationship to Roman law concepts of peregrinus, which is a meaningful omission given how closely Latin legal vocabulary traveled between Roman, canon, and common law traditions.
No other standard historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry this term with independent treatment. Its absence from later dictionaries reflects how thoroughly the term fell out of active legal usage after the medieval period, surviving only as a historical reference point.
Researchers should not rely on Burrill's single-line entry as a complete account. The Fleta citation itself requires consultation, and the broader context of medieval personal status law provides the frame that Burrill's entry leaves implicit.
Jurisdictional Note
Peregrinatio as a legal term of art is specific to medieval English common law and, in a related register, to medieval canon law. It has no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. Roman law scholarship uses the cognate term peregrinus with a different and non-equivalent meaning.