Definition
A writ of medieval English origin directed to the coroners of a county, commanding them to go to the sheriff when the sheriff had suppressed or neglected to return a writ of pone. Upon delivery, the writ required the sheriff to make the return that had been withheld. The name derives from the Latin for "you go to the sheriff" — a directive to the coroners as officers independent of the sheriff to compel compliance with prior process.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a strictly historical term belonging to the procedural machinery of medieval and early modern English common law. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in writs registers, Year Books, and treatises on the forms of action. Its appearance in a source signals proximity to procedural disputes over the sheriff's administrative duties — particularly the return of process — rather than any substantive legal question.
The writ is tightly paired with the writ of pone. No researcher should attempt to interpret accedas ad vice comitem without first understanding pone, which was the foundational writ triggering the sheriff's obligation. The accedas ad vice comitem was purely remedial — it existed to cure a sheriff's failure to act on pone. Understanding this dependency clarifies that the writ reflects a broader system of hierarchical enforcement in which coroners served as a check on sheriffs when the normal chain of process broke down.
Because this writ was a creature of English practice with no meaningful transplantation into American colonial or post-independence procedure, it will not appear in American case law or statutes. Researchers working in early American legal history who encounter references to sheriffs failing to return process will find entirely different remedial mechanisms in use. The term is confined to English primary sources and treatises drawing directly on English forms.
Spelling variation is a minor but real research trap. Early printed registers and copied manuscripts rendered Latin procedural terms inconsistently. The Black's second edition entry reflects a corrupted or abbreviated headword ("Aoccedas") rather than the standard Latin "Accedas ad vice comitem." Researchers searching historical databases should use the corrected form and anticipate variant spellings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only entry among the surveyed sources. The definition is spare but accurate in its essentials: it identifies the writ's addressees (coroners), its occasion (the sheriff's suppression or neglect of a writ of pone), and its effect (compelling the sheriff to make return). The citation to Reg. Orig. 83 — the Registrum Omnium Brevium, a register of original writs — is the appropriate primary source for this class of writ and confirms the entry's grounding in authentic English procedural authority.
What Black's does not provide is any procedural or historical context explaining why coroners rather than some other officer were the designated enforcers, or how frequently this writ was actually employed in practice. The coroners' role here is a vestige of their original function as keepers of the crown's pleas and supervisors of the sheriff — a dimension entirely absent from the modern understanding of a coroner's office. Researchers seeking that context must look beyond Black's to treatises on English local administration and the history of the coroner's office, or to Maitland and Pollock's work on early English legal history.
No other Law Mind shelf sources contain entries for this term, which is consistent with its extreme obscurity and obsolescence. The absence from later editions of Black's and from American legal encyclopedias reflects the writ's complete inapplicability outside the specific procedural context of pre-modern English county administration.