Definition
A term from Roman law denoting a class of petty fraudsters or thieves who operated by means of sacks, bags, or purses carried on their persons. The saccularii were subject to criminal or quasi-criminal sanction under Roman law as a recognized category of offender. The precise nature of their conduct is disputed: whether they were pickpockets and cutpurses who stole from others' purses, or fraudsters who used concealed bags and sacks as instruments of deception in commercial dealings involving goods or money.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in Roman law contexts and will surface in English legal literature primarily through commentaries on Roman criminal law or comparative treatments of theft and fraud. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be aware that the term's appearance in English sources is almost always mediated through Blackstone or Digest citations, and those two pathways lead to subtly different constructions of the offense. If you encounter saccularii in a treatise or commentary, the first question is which tradition the author is drawing from — the Blackstonian cutpurse reading or the Digest-based commercial fraud reading — because the surrounding argument will differ accordingly.
The term has no living common law application and no statutory history in English or American law. It functions in the corpus as a historical reference point in discussions of larceny, fraud, or the Roman law antecedents of common law theft offenses. Cross-referencing to treatments of furtum (Roman theft) and to discussions of fraud by false pretenses will often yield more context than pursuing saccularii directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's agree that saccularii is a Roman law term and that the root is the Latin for bag or sack. They diverge meaningfully on what the term actually designated.
Black's Law Dictionary follows Blackstone in translating saccularii as "cutpurses," citing 4 Stephen's Commentaries 125. This reading treats the saccularii as a species of thief — one who physically cuts or steals from the purses of others — and places them in the lineage of common law larceny.
Burrill offers a more careful treatment. Drawing directly on Digest 47.11.7 and its marginal gloss, Burrill renders the offense as fraud by means of bags and sacks carried by the offender — "vetitas in sacculo artes exercentes," meaning those who practiced forbidden arts by means of a sack. On this reading, the saccularii were not necessarily stealing from others' purses but were using concealed bags as instruments of commercial deception, perhaps to manipulate weights, conceal inferior goods, or otherwise cheat in transactions. Burrill explicitly notes that Blackstone's "cutpurse" translation is "hardly warranted by the text," a pointed editorial observation that alerts researchers to treat the Blackstonian gloss with caution.
The divergence is not merely philological. It reflects a broader pattern in early English legal scholarship of assimilating Roman law concepts into common law categories, sometimes at the cost of precision. Blackstone's cutpurse reading maps saccularii neatly onto larceny; Burrill's reading maps it more naturally onto fraud or obtaining by false pretenses. Neither modern legal dictionaries nor Roman law scholarship has treated this as a live controversy, because the term has no operative legal significance in Anglo-American law. But for researchers tracing the conceptual history of theft or fraud, the distinction matters.