Definition
Law French term meaning "full age" — the point at which a person was legally recognized as having reached majority and was no longer subject to the disabilities of minority. Upon attaining pleine age, an individual gained full legal capacity: the right to hold and convey land independently, to sue and be sued in one's own name, to enter binding contracts, and to exercise other legal rights previously held in suspension or managed by a guardian or lord. The Latin equivalent, plena ætas or plenæ ætatis, appears in the same contexts and carries identical meaning.
In the feudal English common law context, the age of majority was typically fixed at twenty-one years for males capable of performing knight's service, with varying thresholds for other tenures and circumstances. Attaining pleine age was not merely a personal milestone but a legal event with immediate property consequences — it triggered the right to enter one's inheritance, to demand livery of seisin from a lord, and to terminate guardianship arrangements.
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Common Language
This is pure legal terminology drawn from Law French with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary modern English. No COMMON LANGUAGE section is warranted.
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Common Confusion
PLEINE AGE / PLENA ÆTAS: These are the Law French and Latin forms of the same concept and may be treated as interchangeable for research purposes. Burrill lists both and cross-references them to the same underlying doctrine. Researchers encountering either form in a historical source are looking at the same legal condition.
PLEINE AGE / NONAGE: These are functional opposites. Pleine age designates the condition of having reached majority; nonage (or minority) designates the condition of being under it. Old sources sometimes define one by reference to the other, which can cause confusion when a passage turns on which status applied at a critical moment.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources — primarily Year Books, early treatises, and cases decided before English legal writing shifted definitively to English. Researchers will encounter pleine age in the context of feudal tenure disputes, inheritance claims, and guardianship proceedings, where attainment of full age was a jurisdictional or procedural trigger, not merely a biographical fact.
Key navigational points:
The Littleton reference in Burrill (Litt. sect. 103) anchors the term in Littleton's Tenures, the foundational medieval treatise on English land law. Any researcher tracing the doctrine of full age in property contexts should begin there and in Coke upon Littleton, where Coke elaborates extensively on the age thresholds applicable to different tenures.
The term does not appear in modern statutory or case law. If a modern source uses it, that is almost certainly a quotation from or citation to an older authority. Do not assume the modern age of majority (now eighteen in most jurisdictions following statutory reform) maps cleanly onto the historical concept — the historical threshold of twenty-one, and the tenure-specific variations beneath it, governed the cases in which this term appears.
Corpus connections: Pleine age intersects with the law of wardship (the lord's right to manage an heir's lands during minority), livery of seisin (the ceremony of transferring possession upon majority), and the writ of cessavit. Researchers working on any of these topics may encounter pleine age as a condition precedent or a point of legal contention.
The companion entry for pleinement (fully; fully administered) from Burrill signals that this Law French vocabulary cluster extends beyond age into administrative and procedural contexts. A researcher who sees pleine age should be alert to related Law French terms in the same source.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source in the Law Mind corpus for this term. His entry is brief but precise: he gives the Law French form, identifies it as old English law, ties it to Littleton section 103, and cross-references the Latin equivalent plena ætas with a direction to see the entry for "Full age." This cross-referencing practice is characteristic of Burrill and signals that the substantive doctrine is developed under the English-language headword rather than the Law French one. Researchers should follow the chain to the Full age entry for the fuller treatment.
No other historical dictionaries in the current corpus contain entries for pleine age. The term's absence from later dictionaries reflects the natural obsolescence of Law French vocabulary as English legal writing matured — the concept survived in English form long after the French label fell out of use.
The companion term pleinement (fully) and its usage in "pleinement administre" (fully administered) from Hobart's Reports (Hob. 178a) illustrates how Law French terms were used operationally in pleading and procedural contexts well into the early modern period, even as the language was otherwise receding.
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Jurisdictional Note
Pleine age is exclusively a term of historical English common law and has no direct application in any modern jurisdiction. The underlying concept — age of majority as a threshold for legal capacity — is now governed by statute everywhere in the common law world, with the threshold generally reduced from twenty-one to eighteen during the twentieth century. Researchers working in Scots law, early American colonial records, or other common law-derived systems may encounter the term but should verify the applicable age threshold for the specific jurisdiction and period under study.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia: Marriage — Capacity to Marry (Age, Consanguinity, Affinity)
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Infancy — Age of Criminal Responsibility
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