Definition
In old English law, a trigamus was a man who had been married three times in succession — that is, who had taken three wives at different times, each marriage following the death of or separation from the prior wife. The term is Latinate legal vocabulary for what modern law would call a person who has married three times sequentially.
The term should be distinguished from a bigamist in the modern sense. A trigamus was not necessarily a criminal. The legal significance of the designation arose primarily in ecclesiastical and common law contexts where the number of prior marriages affected a man's eligibility for certain privileges — most notably benefit of clergy.
Common Confusion
TRIGAMUS vs. BIGAMUS: In modern usage, bigamy and trigamy denote the criminal act of marrying while a prior spouse is still living. In old English law, the terms bigamus and trigamus carried a technically different meaning rooted in canon law: they described a man who had been married multiple times sequentially (not simultaneously), and the significance was disqualification from benefit of clergy and certain ecclesiastical offices. A man who had been married to a widow was also considered bigamus under canon law, regardless of his own prior marital history. Researchers working in pre-modern sources must resist importing the modern criminal connotation into these terms.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources relating to benefit of clergy — the privilege allowing certain defendants to claim clerical status and escape secular punishment. Under medieval and early modern English law, repeated marriage could strip a man of this privilege, and the technical counting of marriages (bigamus, trigamus) had real procedural consequences.
Researchers working with early English criminal records, ecclesiastical court materials, or treatises on benefit of clergy will encounter these Latin designations. The critical trap is anachronistic reading: trigamus in a 16th- or 17th-century document does not signal a charge of criminal polygamy in the modern sense. It is a status descriptor, not an offense label.
The primary authority cited across all source dictionaries is Coke's Institutes (3 Inst. 88), making that the anchor citation for any research into this term's legal operation. Researchers should consult that passage directly to understand the privilege-stripping mechanism in its original doctrinal context.
The term has no surviving presence in modern statutory or common law. It is a fossil term — valuable for understanding historical legal status but carrying no operative legal meaning today.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's each define trigamus identically as one who has been thrice married, successively, and each cite 3 Inst. 88 as the single authoritative source. There is no divergence among the dictionaries on meaning or application.
Burrill's adds the Greek roots (τρίγαμος, from τρὶς, three times, and γάμος, marriage), which is useful for researchers encountering variant spellings or related Latinate forms in manuscript sources.
Bouvier's entry places trigamus in useful company, immediately following with trigild (triple payment as satisfaction) and trineptis (great-granddaughter of a grandchild), signaling that these are all archaic Latinate terms of old English law with no living application in Bouvier's own era.
None of the historical dictionaries address the ecclesiastical law background in depth — namely, the canon law rule that made repeated marriage a disqualifying status. Researchers seeking the doctrinal foundation must go beyond the dictionary entries to Coke directly and to treatments of benefit of clergy in legal history scholarship.
Jurisdictional Note
Trigamus is a term of old English law with no American statutory presence. It does not appear in any U.S. jurisdictional framework as a defined legal status. American researchers will encounter it only in historical materials or in discussions of the English common law background to marriage-related doctrines.