ACCEDAS AD VICECOMITEM

Definition

A writ directed to the coroner commanding him to deliver a writ to the sheriff. The writ issued when a sheriff had received a pone — a writ transferring a cause from an inferior court into a higher court — but suppressed or failed to act upon it. Because the sheriff was the ordinary officer responsible for executing writs, his failure or refusal to act required the intervention of the coroner, who served as the sheriff's principal substitute when the sheriff was unable, unwilling, or disqualified to perform his duties. The writ's name is Latin for "you shall go to the sheriff," reflecting its operative command to the coroner to proceed where the sheriff had not.

Common Confusion

This writ should not be confused with the pone itself. The pone transferred jurisdiction — it was the underlying writ moving a case from an inferior to a higher court. The accedas ad vicecomitem was the enforcement mechanism, the secondary writ that arose only when the pone had been delivered to the sheriff but deliberately suppressed. The accedas ad vicecomitem did not transfer any cause on its own; it compelled action on a transfer already initiated.

Why It Matters in Research

This is a term of purely historical significance. Researchers will encounter it only in pre-modern English common law materials — primarily treatises, Year Books, and early American materials that borrowed English procedure wholesale. The writ belongs to the obsolete architecture of the old common law writ system, which was abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century and progressively abandoned in American jurisdictions through procedural reforms culminating in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) and equivalent state adoptions. Two research traps apply. First, the term appears in treatises on pleading and practice as a passing reference rather than a developed topic, meaning researchers may encounter it in footnotes or parentheticals without further explanation. Second, the coroner's role as substitute process officer — the functional premise of this writ — is itself an obsolete conception of that office. Modern researchers familiar with coroners only as death investigators will find the procedural coroner of historical English law a distinct and unfamiliar figure. Any research touching on historical writ practice, the coroner's early common law functions, or the mechanics of pre-reform court transfer procedure should account for this writ's place in that system. The writ also illustrates a broader pattern worth noting for corpus navigation: the class of writs directed at officers rather than parties. These writs — mandamus, procedendo, and related forms — are documented unevenly across historical dictionaries, and accedas ad vicecomitem is among the more sparsely treated. Researchers relying solely on American legal dictionaries may find only minimal coverage; English sources and treatises on the history of the writ system will be more informative.

Historical Dictionary Support

Rapalje & Lawrence provide the core description concisely: the writ goes to the coroner when the sheriff has suppressed a pone delivered to him, commanding the coroner to deliver the writ to the sheriff. This matches the general account found in historical treatises on common law process. The definition is reliable as a starting point but offers no procedural context — nothing on how the suppression was established, what proof was required, or how the coroner's intervention was then enforced. Historical sources generally treat this writ as a minor mechanical remedy within a larger system they assume the reader already understands, so coverage is thin across the board. No significant disagreement among historical dictionaries has been identified; the sparseness is uniform rather than contested.

Jurisdictional Note

This writ had no meaningful life in American practice as an independent procedural device. American jurisdictions adopted English writ forms selectively and unevenly in the colonial and early republic periods, and accedas ad vicecomitem does not appear to have generated a body of American case law. It is primarily relevant to research in English legal history and to understanding the English procedural sources that American treatise writers cited.

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