Definition
A Latin legal phrase meaning "to take assizes" or "to hold the assizes." The term refers to the authority or commission granted to judges or commissioners empowering them to conduct assize proceedings — the itinerant court sessions through which royal justice was administered in medieval and early modern England. The phrase appears both in its plural form (ad assisas capiendas, referring to assizes generally) and in the singular variant ad assisam capiendam (to take a single assize), the two forms being used interchangeably across the sources depending on context.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is encountered almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, treatises, and commission instruments. Researchers working in primary sources from that period — particularly commission rolls, plea rolls, or manuscript treatises — will find it as a term of authorization describing the judicial authority under which assize justices operated.
The phrase belongs to a cluster of ad + gerundive Latin formulas that appear in writs and commissions of the period. Understanding the formula is necessary to parse the scope of a commission: ad assisas capiendas describes the general authority to hold assizes, while other ad-formulas in the same document might limit or expand specific subject-matter jurisdiction. Conflating the general commission with more specific delegations of authority is a common interpretive error in archival work.
Researchers should also note that "assize" itself underwent significant semantic evolution. By the later common law period, the term had fragmented into several distinct procedural and substantive meanings — the Grand Assize, the petty assizes (novel disseisin, mort d'ancestor, darrein presentment), assize courts as a general institution, and assize as a legislative or regulatory enactment. The phrase ad assisas capiendas, when encountered in a source, should prompt the researcher to identify which sense of "assize" the document invokes. Bracton's use of the phrase, cited across all shelf sources, points to the judicial-commission context, but later instruments may use it more broadly.
Because this phrase appears primarily in Law Latin sources, researchers relying on translated calendars or regests rather than original documents should verify that the translation accurately captures the scope of the original authorization.
Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources agree completely on the core translation. Black's (both editions) and Burrill render the phrase as "to take assizes; to take or hold the assizes," while Bouvier offers the compressed equivalent "to hold the assizes." There is no substantive disagreement among the four sources.
All sources anchor the phrase to Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (folios 110a and 110b), and Black's and Burrill also cite Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, page 185) as a secondary authority. These citations locate the phrase firmly within the treatise tradition of medieval English common law.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any contextual guidance on the procedural mechanics underlying the authorization — the nature of the commission, who received it, or how it related to the broader structure of royal judicial administration. For that context, the dictionary entries must be supplemented with treatise literature and the secondary scholarship on the assize system.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Assizes; Writs and Commissions; Law Latin Formulas