Definition
In historical legal usage, CASTING means offering or alleging something by way of excuse or justification in a legal proceeding. The term appears almost exclusively in the compound phrase "casting an essoin," which referred to the act of alleging a lawful excuse for a party's failure to appear in court to answer an action. The casting party — typically through an agent or attorney — would formally present the essoin (the excuse itself) to the court, asserting that the absent party was detained by illness, royal service, or some other recognized ground of exemption from attendance.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "cast" — covering acts of throwing, assigning roles in a performance, shaping molten material in a mold, and related senses.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of throwing or shaping material in a mold; also the object produced by that process, such as a casting in iron or bronze.
The legal sense of CASTING has no meaningful connection to either the physical act of throwing or the industrial process of molding. In law, casting is a verbal or procedural act — the formal presentation of an excuse to a tribunal — not a physical one. A researcher encountering the word in historical court records should not import any of the common meanings; the term functions entirely within the technical vocabulary of essoin practice.
Common Confusion
CASTING is frequently encountered only alongside ESSOIN, and the two terms are sometimes treated as interchangeable in older secondary literature. They are not. The essoin is the excuse itself — the substantive ground (illness, being beyond the sea, royal service) for non-appearance. The casting is the procedural act of offering or presenting that excuse to the court. One casts an essoin; the essoin is what is cast. Conflating the two obscures whether a historical source is describing the substance of the excuse or the procedural step of tendering it.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, early common law treatises — will encounter "casting an essoin" as a routine procedural reference. Several points matter for accurate interpretation:
First, the term is archaic and jurisdiction-specific. It belongs almost entirely to the pre-modern English common law. Researchers working in American, Scottish, or civil law sources will rarely if ever encounter it as a term of art.
Second, the procedural context matters. Essoin practice was governed by elaborate rules — different essoins applied to different stages of litigation, time limits applied to the casting, and some essoins could be cast only a fixed number of times before forfeiture. A reference to "casting" in a historical record situates the reader at a specific moment in the litigation sequence, not merely at a vague point of procedural delay.
Third, the corpus connections run through ESSOIN, not through CASTING independently. Black's treats CASTING as a subordinate term, defined only by reference to its companion phrase. Researchers should treat this entry as a navigational pointer toward the fuller treatment under ESSOIN, where the taxonomy of essoins, the rules of essoin days, and the conditions under which essoins could be cast are developed.
Fourth, the word's modern irrelevance is itself a research signal. Finding "casting" used as a standalone legal term in any post-seventeenth-century source should prompt scrutiny — either the source is antiquarian, the usage is non-legal, or there is a transcription or editorial anomaly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce the same entry verbatim, citing Holthouse — a reference to H.J. Holthouse's A New Law Dictionary (1839), which treated essoin practice as part of the then-still-relevant historical fabric of English procedure. Neither edition elaborates beyond the single-sentence definition, which reflects how narrow and technically settled the term was even by the time Black's was compiled.
Neither edition of Black's attempts to situate CASTING within the broader framework of essoin law or to explain when and how the casting procedure could be defeated, waived, or forfeited — all of which are addressed in earlier treatises on common law procedure. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and later Blackstone's Commentaries provide the surrounding procedural context that the dictionary entries omit.
The entries agree completely on substance, suggesting no doctrinal evolution occurred between the editions and that by the late nineteenth century, the term was treated as a historical artifact requiring only definitional preservation, not active doctrinal development.
Jurisdictional Note
CASTING in the legal sense of tendering an essoin is a feature of English common law only. American courts adopted modified versions of appearance and continuance rules that did not carry over the essoin vocabulary, rendering this term functionally obsolete in U.S. legal practice by the time of the founding. Researchers working in colonial American records may encounter residual usage in jurisdictions with close institutional ties to English practice, but this should be treated as a borrowing rather than an independent doctrinal tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ESSOIN; APPEARANCE (historical practice)