Definition
"And the said I" is a pleading formula that appears in historical common law declarations and other formal court documents. The phrase functions as a connective or referential shorthand, linking a prior identification of a party (typically the plaintiff or defendant, identified earlier in the pleading by name) to a continuing narrative or allegation. In practice, the construction appears as part of a longer recitative passage: having introduced a party by full name or title, the pleader then refers back to that party using "and the said [first letter of surname or abbreviated designation]" to avoid repetition while maintaining formal continuity within the document.
The notation "S." referenced by Rapalje & Lawrence (from 1 Raymond 1178) represents the same convention applied to a surname initial, confirming that these abbreviated referential tags were standard tools of formal pleading style, not substantive legal terms.
Common Confusion
"And the said I" should not be confused with a citation, a party designation in the modern sense, or a term of art carrying independent legal meaning. It is purely structural scaffolding within a pleading. Researchers occasionally misread the trailing initial as a case abbreviation or as a garbled transcription rather than as a deliberate referential device.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical pleadings, declarations, or writs will encounter this formula most commonly in printed case reports and manuscript records from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, particularly in common law courts following English pleading conventions. The abbreviation or partial rendering of the phrase — often appearing as "and the said I." or "and the said S." — can cause confusion when a reader mistakes the trailing letter for a word or a case citation rather than recognizing it as a party reference.
The key research trap is misreading these connective tags as substantive legal content. In older printed reports, typographic inconsistency means the initial may appear italicized, bracketed, or expanded differently across editions, sometimes obscuring its purely structural role.
This phrase has no continuing life in modern pleading. Code pleading and notice pleading systems, which replaced common law special pleading in virtually all American jurisdictions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eliminated the elaborate referential formulas that made such connectives necessary. Encountering "and the said I" in a source is therefore a reliable indicator that the document predates or operates within a common law special pleading framework.
The companion phrase "and thereupon," cited by Rapalje & Lawrence from 100 Mass. 195, is a related connective used to signal a consequential act or event following a previously stated fact — distinct in function from "and the said I," which identifies a party rather than a logical consequence.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat this entry with characteristic economy, citing it as a pleading convention without further elaboration beyond the case reference to 1 Raymond 1178. The brevity of the entry reflects its status as a technical artifact of formal pleading practice rather than a term carrying independent doctrinal weight. The citation to 1 Raymond places the usage squarely in the English common law tradition, and the pairing with "and thereupon" in the same dictionary cluster signals that both phrases belong to a family of pleading connectives that served structural rather than substantive functions.
Historical dictionaries generally do not expand on these formulas because their meaning was transparent to practitioners trained in special pleading. The modern researcher, lacking that training, may need to consult pleading manuals such as Chitty on Pleading or Stephen's Principles of Pleading for fuller treatment of how these connectives operated within complete pleading structures.