Definition
Princes of the Royal Blood are the male-line descendants of the sovereign recognized by law as belonging to the royal family, historically carrying specific legal privileges, disabilities, and obligations distinct from ordinary subjects. In English legal usage, the term identifies those members of the royal family whose status as princes derived from blood descent from the reigning monarch or a recognized royal ancestor, as opposed to those who acquired royal or noble rank by creation or marriage.
The phrase is closely associated with the doctrine that royal birth confers a legal status — not merely a social distinction — that affects capacity to contract marriage, hold certain offices, inherit property under special rules, and in earlier periods, claim feudal incidents and protections unavailable to common subjects.
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Common Confusion
"Princes of the Royal Blood" is sometimes loosely equated with the peerage or the nobility generally. This is incorrect. Peers hold rank by royal creation or inheritance of a created title; princes of the royal blood hold status by descent, independent of any creation. A prince of the royal blood might hold no peerage title, and a duke or earl is not a prince of the royal blood unless descended in the recognized line from a sovereign. Researchers should not conflate references to "princes" in historical texts with "peers" — the legal consequences attached to each category differ substantially.
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Why It Matters in Research
Historical legal sources treat this category with precision that modern readers may underestimate. Several distinct legal consequences flowed from the status in English law:
First, marriage. The Royal Marriages Act 1772 imposed restrictions specifically on descendants of George II, requiring royal consent for marriage below a certain age. Researchers working with family law, succession, or property disputes involving royal-line individuals in the post-1772 period must account for this statute, which rendered unauthorized marriages void. Sources predating 1772 operate under different assumptions.
Second, feudal incidents. Before the abolition of feudal tenures (largely accomplished by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660), princes of the royal blood could be implicated in primer seisin and other incidents that attached differently to royal as opposed to common landholders. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry fragment explicitly connects this term to the discussion of primer seisin — researchers should understand that the legal privileges and burdens of royal-blood status intersected with the feudal land system in ways that become invisible after 1660.
Third, treason law. Certain acts against princes of the royal blood — including, at various periods, compassing the death of a prince of the blood — carried treason consequences under extensions of the Statute of Treasons. This makes the category legally operative in criminal as well as civil contexts.
For corpus researchers: the term appears most frequently in sources dealing with succession, feudal incidents, treason, and the Royal Marriages Act. When encountered in a pre-1660 source, a feudal-incidents context is probable. When encountered in an 18th- or 19th-century source, a marriage or succession context is more likely. The phrase "blood royal" is an older inversion of the same concept and should be treated as synonymous for indexing purposes.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence place this term in proximity to primer seisin and the abolition of feudal incidents, which accurately locates one of its principal historical legal functions: the special rules governing how lands held by or descending through royal-blood individuals interacted with the Crown's feudal rights. The entry fragment references the abolition of primer seisin by statute, correctly situating the term within the pre-1660 feudal framework. This is a reliable pointer but a narrow one — it captures the property and tenure dimension without addressing the marriage, treason, or succession dimensions that are equally prominent in the broader legal literature.
Historical dictionaries generally handle this term incompletely because its full legal significance is distributed across feudal law, constitutional law, and criminal law rather than concentrated in a single doctrinal home. Researchers should not treat any single dictionary entry as comprehensive. Blackstone's Commentaries address the constitutional position of princes of the blood more fully than most legal dictionaries.
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Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of English constitutional and common law with no direct analogue in American law following independence. American legal sources do not recognize a category of "princes of the royal blood," and researchers encountering the term in early American sources will almost certainly be reading borrowed English doctrine or commentary on English law.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Royal Prerogative
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Feudal Tenures
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Succession to the Crown
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