Definition
Auditus is a Latin term from old common law pleading and practice meaning "hearing." It appears in procedural formulas and recitals in historical pleadings, most prominently in connection with oyer — the formal right of a party to have a document read aloud in open court before being required to plead to it. The term signals the act of a party receiving, or requesting to receive, oral rendition of a written instrument as part of the pleading process.
The phrase auditus scripti (hearing of the writing) is the operative form most encountered in historical records. When a defendant or plaintiff sought oyer of a deed, bond, or other instrument, the pleading recited that the party prays the hearing (petit auditum) of the writing, after which the document was read aloud and entered into the record in haec verba — in those very words.
Common Language
Wiktionary: "auditus" — the past participle of the Latin verb audire, meaning "heard"; also used as a noun meaning "the sense of hearing" or "a hearing."
Webster's 1913: Does not carry a dedicated entry for auditus as an English or legal term; the root audire appears in derivatives such as "audit" and "audible."
The gap between ordinary Latin usage and legal usage is narrow but precise. In common Latin, auditus simply describes the act or faculty of hearing. In legal pleading, it became a term of art embedded in formal procedural phrases — particularly the oyer formula — where "hearing" meant the specific procedural event of having a written instrument recited aloud before the court, with legal consequences for the pleading that followed. A researcher encountering auditus in a case report needs the procedural context, not just a Latin dictionary.
Common Confusion
Auditus is closely associated with, but not identical to, oyer. Oyer is the English common law right or demand itself; auditus is the Latin word for the hearing that oyer produced. Historical pleadings in Law French or law Latin used auditus as the operative term within the formula; later reports and treatises translated the concept into the English term oyer. Researchers must not treat the two as interchangeable when working with original Latin pleading records, where auditus describes the act while oyer describes the procedural entitlement.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively a pleading relic. Researchers will encounter auditus almost exclusively in:
1. Pre-nineteenth-century English case reports, particularly those reporting pleadings in extenso where the Latin forms were preserved verbatim.
2. Forms books and pleading manuals from the period when Latin was the language of record in English courts (abolished for most purposes in England in 1733).
3. American colonial and early republic records that followed English pleading forms.
The critical navigational point: auditus does not appear as a freestanding doctrinal concept. It appears inside set formulas. When a Burrill or other historical dictionary entry quotes "et petunt auditum scripti prædicti, et eis legitur in hæc verba," that is a verbatim extract of the oyer formula. Researchers chasing the procedural doctrine should pivot immediately to oyer, craving oyer, and the rules governing when oyer could be demanded and what happened to a party who failed to plead after it was granted.
The phrase in auditu quamplurimorum — in the hearing of very many — appears in a different context: establishing that a statement or act was made publicly, which carried evidentiary or reputational significance in defamation and related actions. A researcher seeing this phrase needs to distinguish it from the oyer usage.
Corpus connections: Entries on oyer, plea in abatement, craving oyer, and common law pleading forms are the natural neighbors. Any Law Mind encyclopedia treatment of formal pleading will provide the structural framework auditus fits within.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary authority here and the entry is representative of how the major historical dictionaries handle auditus — as a Latin root requiring translation into its procedural context rather than as a doctrine in its own right. Burrill correctly locates the term inside the oyer formula, cites Hobart and Raymond as illustration, and notes the connection to the conditional pleading rule (si querens petat auditum — if the plaintiff pray oyer). No significant divergence exists among historical sources because auditus never developed as an independent doctrinal term; it was always a word within a formula.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss, or leave implicit, is that auditus as a procedural event had real consequences: once oyer was granted and the instrument read, the party was bound by its terms as recited, and could not later dispute what had been entered. The hearing was not ceremonial. That substantive consequence is understated in purely lexical treatments.
Jurisdictional Note
Auditus as a term of pleading art was native to English common law courts. American jurisdictions that adopted common law pleading forms used the same Latin formulas through the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, but code pleading reforms — beginning with the New York Field Code of 1848 — displaced Latin pleading forms and with them the practical use of auditus in court records.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Oyer
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Law Pleading