Definition
In Roman and civil law, and in early English common law usage, *pueri* (singular: *puer*) means children — specifically, persons of immature age considered as members of a family or bloodline. The term carries both its literal sense of young persons and its legal sense of offspring in relation to their parents, particularly for purposes of descent, inheritance, and blood relationship.
The term appears most prominently in the maxim: *Pueri sunt de sanguine parentum, sed pater et mater non sunt de sanguine puerorum* — children are of the blood of their parents, but the father and mother are not of the blood of the children. This principle had direct operative consequences in the law of descent, determining which kin could inherit through a given line and in what direction blood relationship was said to flow.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Puer* (Latin) means "boy" or "child." *Pueri* is its plural. In modern usage outside legal and classical contexts, the term is essentially confined to Latin instruction.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry an entry for *pueri* as an English word; it was not naturalized into common English vocabulary.
The gap here is one of scope rather than meaning reversal. In common Latin, *pueri* simply means boys or children. In legal usage, the term was freighted with doctrinal weight — specifically, the asymmetric nature of blood descent in inheritance law. The word carried a precise technical implication that children draw blood from parents, but parents do not draw blood from children, a distinction with real consequences for who could inherit as heir-at-law when an estate passed upward or collaterally.
Core Elements
The maxim associated with *pueri* encodes a specific rule of consanguinity:
1. DESCENT OF BLOOD IS DOWNWARD: Blood flows from parent to child, not from child to parent. A parent is not "of the blood" of the child in the legal sense relevant to inheritance.
2. CONSEQUENCE FOR INHERITANCE: Under traditional common law rules of descent, land could not ascend from a child to a parent as heir, because the parent was not considered to share the child's blood in the heritable sense. This blocked a class of claims that might otherwise seem natural.
3. BLOODLINE TRACING: The maxim shaped how courts traced descent through a line to identify the proper heir, requiring the search to proceed through collateral kin rather than ascending to a parent who took the child's blood but did not give it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law — particularly in the law of real property descent, inheritance disputes, and the feudal land tenures from which those rules derived — will encounter *pueri* and its associated maxim as doctrinal shorthand for a rule that shaped property outcomes in ways that no longer apply under modern intestacy statutes.
The critical trap is reading the maxim out of its historical context. Modern intestacy law in virtually every common law jurisdiction allows parents to inherit from a childless intestate child. The ancient rule embedded in the *pueri* maxim — that parents stood outside the heritable bloodline — was abolished or superseded over time by statute and by the restructuring of inheritance rules away from the strict feudal descent model. A researcher who encounters the maxim in a primary source should not assume it states current law.
The maxim also appears in the context of disputes about collateral inheritance: when a child dies without issue, who takes the land — maternal collaterals, paternal collaterals, or the parents? The *pueri* principle directed the answer toward collateral kin in the ascending bloodline rather than to the parents themselves.
Researchers working with Coke, Littleton, or early Year Book materials will find this maxim cited as settled doctrine. Its citation in 3 Co. 40a (Coke's Reports) marks it as part of the authoritative common law inheritance framework Coke was synthesizing and transmitting.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a spare but accurate entry. It supplies the Latin plural, translates the term as "children," and immediately anchors it to the maxim from Coke's Reports. This is characteristic of how mid-nineteenth-century legal dictionaries treated Latin maxims: the definition is essentially the maxim, and the maxim is understood to be self-explanatory to a trained reader.
What Burrill does not do — and what researchers should supply from other sources — is explain why the maxim mattered or what practical consequences followed from it. The entry functions as a cross-reference point rather than a doctrinal explanation. Researchers who need the full context of the rule should look to Coke on Littleton and to Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II, Chapter 14) for the developed exposition of descent rules in which this maxim operated.
No significant divergence among historical dictionaries on this term is expected; the term is too narrowly Latin and too closely tied to a single maxim to have attracted varied treatments.
Jurisdictional Note
The *pueri* maxim was operative in English common law jurisdictions inheriting the feudal rules of real property descent. American common law jurisdictions absorbed the underlying rule, but it was progressively displaced by intestacy statutes beginning in the nineteenth century. The maxim has no operative force in modern American, English, or Commonwealth probate practice.