Definition
Latin. In civil and common law, a sacrilegious person — one guilty of sacrilege. More specifically, one who steals or wrongfully takes anything consecrated to the service of God or dedicated to divine worship. The term functioned both as a designation of status (identifying a person as a sacrilege-offender) and as a term of legal condemnation carrying moral weight beyond ordinary theft or robbery.
The maxim attached to this term in the historical sources captures its legal gravity: Sacrilegus omnium prædonum cupiditatem et scelera superat — "A sacrilegious person transcends the cupidity and wickedness of all other robbers." This formulation, drawn from 4 Coke 106 (Adam's and Lambert's Case), elevated the sacrilegus above common thieves in the hierarchy of wrongdoers, reflecting the fusion of ecclesiastical and secular legal frameworks that characterized both Roman civil law and early common law treatment of offenses against the church.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Sacrilegious" means involving or committing sacrilege; showing disrespect for something considered sacred.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Sacrilegious" — violating sacred things; polluted with sacrilege; committing sacrilege.
The common adjective "sacrilegious" carries a broad moral or cultural meaning — any act of disrespect toward the sacred. The legal term sacrilegus is narrower and more specific: it identifies a person who has taken property set apart for divine service, grounding what feels like a moral judgment in a concrete legal wrong analogous to theft. The term belongs to a period when desecrating or stealing consecrated property was treated as a distinct legal category, not merely an aggravating circumstance.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of Roman civil law origin that migrated into English common law discourse primarily through ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the influence of canon law. Researchers encountering sacrilegus in historical sources should be alert to several issues.
First, the term appears most naturally in contexts involving church property, tithes, burial grounds, sacred vessels, and dedicated lands. Historical cases involving theft from churches or interference with consecrated property may use sacrilegus as a characterizing term rather than a formal charge, making it easy to overlook in keyword searches focused on "theft" or "larceny" alone.
Second, the maxim from 4 Coke 106 is frequently cited in early common law sources as a rhetorical intensifier — invoked to argue that offenses against sacred property warrant harsher treatment than ordinary property crimes. Researchers tracing the severity of punishment for church-related offenses should follow this citation as an anchor point across multiple treatises.
Third, because sacrilegus straddles civil law, canon law, and common law, it appears in sources that are not always shelved together. It may surface in ecclesiastical court records, civilian treatises, and early common law reports, requiring cross-corpus searching that does not stay within a single jurisdiction or tradition.
Fourth, the term should be understood as a precursor to later statutory offenses involving church robbery and sacrilege that were codified in English law. The conceptual lineage from sacrilegus to those later statutory forms is direct but rarely made explicit in the statutes themselves.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries consulted are in close agreement on the core definition. All three identify sacrilegus as a Latin civil and common law term for a sacrilegious person or one guilty of sacrilege, and all three reproduce the maxim from 4 Coke 106 as the primary legal authority.
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most substantively useful amplification. Burrill adds a functional definition absent from Black's editions: one who "takes away any thing that is given for the divine and true service of God." This addition grounds the term in a concrete legal act — misappropriation of consecrated property — rather than leaving it at the level of moral characterization. Burrill's definition also gestures toward a broader conception that would encompass desecration, not only theft, though the property-taking sense is primary.
Black's first and second editions are nearly identical to each other on this term and offer no expansion beyond the maxim citation. Neither edition traces the term's Roman civil law origins in detail or distinguishes between its civilian and common law usages. Researchers relying solely on Black's without Burrill's amplification may miss the definitional precision that Burrill supplies.
All three sources cite 4 Coke 106 (Adam's and Lambert's Case) as the anchor authority. No source flags the term's canon law dimensions or its connection to ecclesiastical court jurisdiction, which is a gap for researchers working on the intersection of church and secular legal authority in the historical corpus.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Sacrilege; Church Property and the Common Law; Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction.