Definition
Ac etiam bille (Latin: "and also to a bill") is a clause formerly inserted in a writ of capias ad respondendum — a common law writ commanding the sheriff to arrest a defendant and compel an appearance — to state the plaintiff's true cause of action. Because the capias ad respondendum was technically a writ sounding in trespass, it could only issue for that form of action. Where the real cause of action was something other than trespass (a debt, a breach of contract, or similar claim), a fiction was employed: the writ commanded the defendant to answer a plea of trespass, and then the ac etiam clause followed to introduce the actual grievance. The phrase thus operated as a procedural bridge, allowing the court to take jurisdiction over the defendant's person while transparently signaling the true nature of the suit.
Common Confusion
Ac etiam bille is sometimes loosely described as the writ itself, but it is properly a clause within a writ of capias ad respondendum, not an independent writ. The writ belonged to the sheriff; the ac etiam clause belonged to the pleader. Researchers working with historical writ files should distinguish the writ form from the bill language embedded in it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in English common law sources from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and is effectively obsolete in modern practice. Researchers will encounter it primarily in three contexts: historical pleading treatises, reports of procedural disputes about the sufficiency of arrest process, and discussions of the legal fictions that undergirded the common law forms of action.
The key research trap is the layered fiction the clause depended upon. Courts required the trespass plea to be formally maintained even when the ac etiam clause revealed a plainly different cause of action. A researcher reading early reports who sees a "plea of trespass" in a writ should check whether an ac etiam clause follows — if it does, the trespass averment is likely fictional scaffolding, and the real dispute is disclosed in the bill language that comes after.
The clause also marks a boundary in legal history: as the forms of action were abolished in England (Uniformity of Process Act 1832, and ultimately the Common Law Procedure Act 1852) and as American states moved toward code pleading through the mid-nineteenth century Field Code reforms, the procedural fictions supporting the capias — and with them the ac etiam clause — disappeared. Sources written before roughly 1850 in England, and before 1848–1880 in most American jurisdictions, may treat this clause as current law; sources written after those dates treat it as history.
Corpus researchers working in Law Mind should connect this clause to the broader literature on the forms of action. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, ch. 19) is the primary reference Burrill himself cites and remains the clearest historical account of how the clause functioned in practice. The Appendix to Volume III of Blackstone reproduced the standard writ form, making it useful for comparing actual writ language against the description in the text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source in the Law Mind corpus that defines this term directly, and its treatment is concise but accurate. Burrill paraphrases Blackstone closely, identifying the clause by its opening Latin words, explaining its function as an expression of the true cause of action, and citing the relevant passage in the Commentaries. He does not editorialize about the fiction or its critics.
What Burrill does not address — and what later legal historians have filled in — is the degree to which the ac etiam fiction was contested. Critics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that maintaining a patently false plea of trespass in the writ degraded the dignity of process and obscured the record. Defenders responded that the fiction was transparent and universally understood, making it harmless. Neither side of that debate appears in the Law Mind historical dictionary sources for this term; researchers seeking it must look to secondary literature on common law procedure reform.
No Webster's 1913 or Wiktionary entry exists for this phrase. It is pure legal Latin with no foothold in ordinary English usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The ac etiam clause was a feature of English common law practice and was carried into American colonial and early republic courts that followed English writ forms. American jurisdictions varied in how faithfully they replicated English capias practice, and some states modified or abandoned the writ forms earlier than others. Researchers working in colonial American court records should not assume uniform usage.