Definition
Assisa de nocumento (Latin: "assize of nuisance") is a medieval English common law writ used to abate or remedy a nuisance affecting real property. The writ initiated a proceeding before royal justices, directing them to inquire by an assize — a sworn jury of local men — whether the plaintiff had suffered a nuisance caused by the defendant's wrongful act or structure on neighboring land. If the jury found for the plaintiff, the court could order abatement of the nuisance and award damages.
The writ belongs to the family of real actions and is best understood as the procedural vehicle by which the common law doctrine of nuisance was given formal, enforceable shape in the medieval period. It is entirely obsolete as a living procedural form.
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Common Confusion
Researchers sometimes encounter assisa de nocumento alongside the related writ quod permittat prosternere, which directed a defendant to permit the plaintiff to abate a nuisance himself, and the assize of novel disseisin, which addressed wrongful dispossession of land. These are distinct writs with distinct procedural histories. Assisa de nocumento was specifically concerned with interference with the use and enjoyment of land through a nuisance, not with outright dispossession. Conflating these writs distorts the medieval procedural picture considerably.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal sources — treatises on medieval English real actions, older editions of Bracton, Britton, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, and Blackstone's Commentaries. Researchers working on the early history of nuisance law need it to trace how nuisance developed from a form-specific writ action into the more flexible tort cause of action familiar today. The transformation is significant: the rigid writ system tightly constrained who could sue, for what, and in what court; the modern tort of nuisance carries almost none of that procedural architecture.
A key trap in historical sources is anachronistic reading. When Blackstone or his predecessors describe the assize of nuisance, they are describing a system of pleading and royal jurisdiction that had already largely collapsed by the early modern period, displaced by actions on the case. A researcher tracing "nuisance" through corpus sources will find the substantive doctrine persisting and expanding while the procedural writ by this name disappears from practical use. The two tracks — substantive doctrine and procedural form — must be kept distinct.
Jurisdictional carryover is essentially nil. American common law inherited the substantive law of nuisance but never adopted the assize system. References to assisa de nocumento in American sources are invariably historical or academic.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines assisa de nocumento tersely as "an assize of nuisance; a writ to abate or redress a nuisance," which is accurate as far as it goes but offers no procedural context. The entry reflects the dictionary's general treatment of obsolete Latin writ names: it identifies and translates, but does not explain. Researchers should not rely on Black's alone for understanding how this writ functioned within the medieval real actions system.
Historical sources richer on this term include Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, which catalogs the forms of writs available in the medieval English courts, and Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which situates the assize of nuisance within the broader framework of possessory remedies. Blackstone's Commentaries address the assize of nuisance in the context of private wrongs to real property, noting its procedural character and its displacement by later forms of action. These sources collectively show a writ that was already becoming archaic by the time systematic common law commentary began.
What historical dictionaries miss is the trajectory: the writ mattered not because it survived, but because it seeded the substantive doctrine of private nuisance that did survive, and that eventually migrated into equity and then into modern tort law entirely detached from its procedural origins.
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Jurisdictional Note
Assisa de nocumento was a writ of English common law and has no procedural application in any modern jurisdiction. American law inherited the substantive doctrine of nuisance but through actions on the case, not through the assize system. The term is relevant only in historical and comparative legal research.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Nuisance (History of); Real Actions; Assize (Medieval English Procedure)
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