Definition
Breve perquirere (Latin: "to purchase a writ") is a historical common law term referring to the act by which a plaintiff obtained, or "purchased," a writ authorizing the commencement of an action in the royal courts. In early English legal practice, initiating litigation in the king's courts required the formal acquisition of an original writ from the Chancery. The plaintiff who performed this act was known as the qui breve perquisivit — the one who had purchased the writ. The term describes both the procedural act and, by extension, the plaintiff's formal entry into the royal court system.
Common Confusion
The word "purchase" here carries its older legal meaning of obtaining or procuring through formal process, not acquiring through monetary payment in the modern commercial sense. While fees were often associated with obtaining writs, the term breve perquirere does not primarily describe a financial transaction. It describes a legal act of acquisition that set the machinery of royal jurisdiction in motion. Researchers encountering the phrase in medieval or early modern sources should resist reading it through a modern commercial lens.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources and is essentially obsolete in living practice. Researchers will encounter it in records touching the writ system — the procedural backbone of the common law before the reforms of the nineteenth century. Understanding breve perquirere is essential for navigating original writ pleading, the forms of action, and the structure of pre-reform litigation in sources such as plea rolls, Year Books, and treatises in the Glanvill and Bracton tradition.
The term signals a research context in which the forms of action governed everything. Which writ was purchased determined what claims could be made, what defenses were available, and which court had jurisdiction. A researcher tracing a dispute in early common law records who finds reference to this term should immediately look to the specific writ procured — writ of right, writ of entry, novel disseisin, and so on — as the writ itself defines the legal universe of that case.
The phrase also connects to the revenue and administrative history of the Chancery. The acquisition of writs was a regulated and, in many periods, a fee-bearing process. This gives breve perquirere relevance not only to legal procedure but to the institutional and fiscal history of the English crown's court administration.
Because the term is Latin and tightly bound to medieval procedure, it rarely appears in sources post-dating the abolition of the forms of action in England (Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and the Judicature Acts of the 1870s). American legal materials will contain it only in historical treatises or in scholarship examining the colonial inheritance of English common law forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the core definition: "To purchase a writ or license of trial, in the king's courts, by the plaintiff, qui breve perquisicit." This entry is minimal but accurate in its essentials. It correctly identifies the actor (the plaintiff), the object (the writ), and the forum (the king's courts), and preserves the Latin identification of the plaintiff as qui breve perquisivit.
What Black's does not address is the procedural weight of the act. The writ was not merely a license to sue — it was the instrument that defined the cause of action, shaped the pleadings, and determined the court's jurisdiction. Historical dictionaries and glossaries from the common law tradition, including Cowell's Interpreter and Termes de la Ley, treat the writ system more extensively, though they do not always isolate breve perquirere as a distinct term of art. Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, and Glanvill before it, provide the most substantive contemporary treatment of the writ acquisition process and remain the authoritative primary sources for researchers seeking depth beyond the dictionary entry.
Jurisdictional Note
Breve perquirere is a term of English common law with no independent development in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. American colonial courts adapted English writ practice to varying degrees, but the term itself has no distinct American usage. Research utility is confined to English legal history.