Definition
A procedural plea in common law pleading, used in actions of trespass, by which the defendant obliged the plaintiff to specify the particular location where the trespass was alleged to have been committed. By requiring that specificity, the defendant could then respond more precisely — either denying the trespass at that place or asserting a justification tied to that location. The blank bar was a defensive pleading device, not a final disposition; its purpose was to sharpen the issues before the substantive plea was joined.
Also called the common bar. The two names refer to the same plea, with "blank bar" reflecting the older usage and "common bar" the more prevalent term in later common law practice.
Common Confusion
BLANK BAR vs. COMMON BAR: These are the same plea. Bouvier redirects readers from blank bar directly to common bar, and Black's treats them as synonyms. Researchers encountering either term in historical pleading records should understand they describe an identical procedural device. The name "blank bar" fell out of use earlier than "common bar," so later sources may only carry the latter form.
BLANK BAR vs. PLEA IN BAR: A plea in bar is the broader genus — any plea that goes to the merits and, if successful, permanently bars the plaintiff's claim. The blank bar is a species of plea in bar, but one directed at procedural specificity (forcing a place assignment) rather than at defeating the claim on its merits outright. Conflating the two obscures the blank bar's preliminary, issue-narrowing function.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially extinct in modern practice and will appear only in historical common law pleading materials — primarily English reports and early American decisions predating code pleading. Researchers working in pre-Field Code sources (pre-1848 in New York; later in other jurisdictions) may encounter the blank bar in trespass actions and should recognize it as a stage in the formal pleading sequence, not a final bar to the action.
The term was most associated with the Court of Common Pleas ("common bench"), as Black's notes. Researchers consulting English reports from that court — including the Croke reports cited in Black's (Cro. Jac. 594) — are most likely to find worked examples of this plea in context.
The disappearance of the blank bar from practice followed the collapse of common law pleading forms under code pleading and later notice pleading regimes. Modern procedural rules replaced the entire architecture of special pleading, including devices like the blank bar, with generalized fact-pleading requirements. No direct modern analog exists.
Corpus researchers should also note that Burrill's entry is incomplete as preserved — the definition trails off mid-sentence, which means that source alone is insufficient for a full understanding of the plea's mechanics. Black's provides the most complete entry among the three historical dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core identification: the blank bar is a plea in trespass compelling the plaintiff to assign a specific place. Black's is the most complete, providing both the synonym (common bar) and the jurisdictional note about the Court of Common Pleas, along with a citation to Croke's Jacobean reports. Bouvier declines to define the term independently and redirects to common bar, suggesting that by Bouvier's time "blank bar" was already receding as the preferred label. Burrill's entry is truncated in the available text, providing partial confirmation of the core definition but no additional analytical content.
None of the three dictionaries provides a worked procedural example of how the plea functioned within a full trespass pleading sequence, which limits their utility for researchers trying to reconstruct actual pleading practice. For that, the Croke reports and treatises on common law pleading — such as Stephen's Treatise on the Principles of Pleading — would be the appropriate next stop.
Jurisdictional Note
The blank bar was a creature of English common law pleading and carried into early American practice before code pleading reforms swept the states beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Its use was primarily associated with the English Court of Common Pleas. American courts applying common law pleading forms used it as well, but no American jurisdiction developed a meaningfully distinct version of the plea.