Definition
A writ directed to the sheriff commanding him to take sureties for a prisoner's appearance and, upon receiving those sureties, to discharge the prisoner from custody. The writ functioned as a mechanism for securing a defendant's future appearance before the court without continued physical detention — the prisoner's release being conditioned on the giving of adequate pledges or bail.
Why It Matters in Research
Captione is a term of medieval common law procedure, belonging to a family of writs concerned with the taking and releasing of persons. Researchers encountering it will almost always be working in historical sources — English common law materials, the Register of Writs (Registrum Omnium Brevium), or treatises drawing on that register such as Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium. The term is effectively obsolete in modern practice and will not appear in contemporary American or English legal materials except in historical or comparative contexts.
The key research trap is confusing captione with similarly named writs. The Latin root capere (to take) generated a cluster of writs with overlapping names: capias, capias ad respondendum, capias ad satisfaciendum, and de homine replegiando all involve the taking or releasing of persons, and a researcher skimming Latin writ registers may conflate them. Captione is specifically the discharge mechanism — it presupposes that a taking has already occurred and that the conditions for release (sureties) are being satisfied.
Because this writ operated within the English writ system codified in the Registrum Omnium Brevium, corpus researchers should treat Rapalje & Lawrence's citations (Reg. Orig. 268b; F. N. B. 250) as the primary trail. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium was a standard practitioner's guide to writ selection, and its treatment of captione situates the writ in the broader system of suretyship and bail that preceded modern bail procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the only dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Their definition is concise and accurate: a writ commanding the sheriff to take sureties and discharge the prisoner. The definition captures the two-part structure of the writ — the taking of pledges and the consequent release — but offers no contextual detail about when the writ would be available, what "sureties" were required, or how it interacted with other writs in the same procedural chain.
Historical sources are thin on this term compared to its more commonly cited relatives. The reference to Reg. Orig. 268b points to the Register of Original Writs, a compilation of standard writ forms used by the English Chancery; the F. N. B. 250 citation refers to Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, a fifteenth-century treatise organizing writs by their practical function. Both are formbook-style sources rather than doctrinal analyses, meaning researchers will find the form of the writ but limited judicial gloss on its operation. No American legal dictionary in the standard corpus independently treats captione, reflecting its status as a writ that did not cross the Atlantic into active use.
Jurisdictional Note
Captione was a writ of the English common law system and has no equivalent in American statutory or procedural law. Researchers working in colonial American records should be cautious: English writ terminology appears sporadically in early colonial court records, but captione specifically is rarely documented in American practice.