Bona Vacantia is an old-fashioned legal phrase still in use. The Latin phrase roughly translated means ‘empty goods’.
When someone has died intestate, it means they haven’t left a valid will. The term in this context is used to mean ‘ownerless property’. This is because there is no valid will and there are no surviving blood-related relatives*. In such a case, anything that remains undistributed is deemed to be Bona Vacantia and passes to the Crown.
*formally stated as ‘all bloodlines have been exhausted to determine the division of the assets’