Definition
Breve cassetur (Latin: "that the writ be quashed") is the traditional form of judgment entered in favor of a defendant who successfully pleads in abatement when an action was commenced by original writ. Upon sustaining a plea in abatement directed at the writ itself, the court does not dismiss the action on its merits but instead orders the writ annulled — literally, quashed — leaving the plaintiff free to commence a new action by proper process. The judgment is thus a procedural defeat for the plaintiff, not a final adjudication of the underlying claim.
Common Confusion
Breve cassetur is sometimes conflated with a general judgment for the defendant or with a judgment on the merits. The distinction is critical: breve cassetur resolves only the sufficiency of the writ, not the cause of action. A plaintiff who receives judgment against them in this form retains the right to sue again. Compare this with a judgment in bar, which extinguishes the underlying claim entirely. Researchers encountering breve cassetur in older pleading records should resist reading it as a final disposition.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English common law pleading records and treatises covering the writ system. Its practical relevance collapsed alongside the original writ system itself: as equity procedure, and later statutory reforms culminating in the English Common Law Procedure Acts of the 1850s and American code pleading reforms beginning with the New York Field Code of 1848, displaced the original writ as the vehicle for commencing civil actions, the procedural occasion that produced a breve cassetur judgment ceased to arise.
Researchers working in colonial American court records, early state court records, or English Year Books and plea rolls should recognize breve cassetur as a terminus in a chain of pleading events. Its presence signals that a defendant filed a plea in abatement challenging the writ's formal validity — not its jurisdiction, not the merits — and prevailed. The record will typically show the plea in abatement preceding it; if not, the researcher should look for a lost or damaged folio.
The term also appears in treatises on common law pleading as a teaching device illustrating the consequences of the various pleas. Blackstone and Stephen both use it in this instructional context, which means researchers will encounter it in secondary sources organized by pleading category rather than in chronological case records. Cross-referencing the treatise passage against the underlying court records, where they survive, often reveals how infrequently the formal judgment phrase appears verbatim in actual practice — clerks often recorded abbreviated or vernacular variants.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, citing Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, at 303) and Stephen on Pleading, and correctly identifies this as the judgment form on a plea in abatement to the writ. Burrill also appends an entry for the verb "to cast" in old English practice — meaning to allege or put forward — noting that "to cast an essoign" meant to allege an excuse for non-appearance. This pairing is editorially useful: both terms occupy the same procedural landscape of formal writ-era pleading, where precise verbal formulas carried legal consequence.
Historical dictionaries generally agree on the meaning of breve cassetur. The term is stable and uncontested across the sources that address it. What historical dictionaries do not adequately convey is how narrow the procedural context was: the judgment applies specifically to the case where the action was commenced by original writ and the plea in abatement succeeded against the writ itself. Pleas in abatement to the count (the declaration) produced different judgment forms, and researchers should not extend breve cassetur to those contexts without corroborating authority.
Jurisdictional Note
Breve cassetur is a term of English common law procedure and has no meaningful life in American practice after the mid-nineteenth century. In jurisdictions that adopted code pleading, the original writ system — and with it the occasion for this judgment — was abolished by statute. The term survives only in historical records and in treatises describing pre-reform practice.