Definition
*Clerico capto per statutum* (Latin: "a clerk taken by statute") is the name of a historical English writ directed to the sheriff, commanding the release of a clergyman who had been arrested and imprisoned under a temporal statute, on the ground that the arrest violated ecclesiastical privilege. The writ operated as a procedural remedy to enforce the principle that a person in holy orders could not be detained by secular authority in contravention of clerical immunities recognized by law. It belongs to a family of related writs — including *de clerico convicto commisso gaolae* and *de clerico capto per mandatum regis* — that collectively governed the intersection of royal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction over persons claiming clerical status.
The writ was distinct from a general writ of habeas corpus. It was not a challenge to the legality of all detention, but a specifically ecclesiastical intervention premised on the arrested party's status as a clerk in orders and on the characterization of the detaining statute as one that could not lawfully reach such a person.
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Common Confusion
This writ is easily conflated with related writs in the *de clerico* family, particularly *de clerico convicto commisso gaolae* (which addressed the delivery of a convicted cleric to the ordinary after secular conviction) and *de clerico capto per mandatum regis* (which addressed arrest by direct royal command rather than by statutory authority). The distinction that matters for research is the triggering mechanism: *clerico capto per statutum* is specifically about arrest under a statute, not royal mandate or post-conviction custody. Burrill's cross-reference entry reflects this family structure but does not spell out the distinctions — researchers must consult the full *de clerico* writ cluster together.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is a term you are most likely to encounter in three contexts: medieval English legal history, surveys of the benefit of clergy doctrine, and comparative ecclesiastical law materials predating the Reformation.
**Navigational traps.** Burrill's entry is a stub — it redirects entirely to the *de clerico* family entries rather than providing independent content. Researchers using Burrill as a primary shelf source for this writ will find almost nothing under this heading and must follow the cross-reference chain to reconstruct the writ's meaning. This is characteristic of how Burrill handles obsolete writs of narrow medieval application.
**Corpus connections.** Any Law Mind source addressing benefit of clergy, ecclesiastical courts, the conflict between canon and common law jurisdiction in medieval and early modern England, or the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) will provide essential context for understanding why this writ existed and what it was protecting. The deeper question — when could secular statute validly reach a clergyman, and when did clerical privilege override it — is the live controversy that generated the writ in the first place.
**Historical reach.** By the later Tudor period, the benefit of clergy had been substantially modified by statute, and the ecclesiastical privilege this writ was designed to enforce had been eroded or restructured. Researchers working in post-Reformation English legal sources will find the writ largely vestigial or already absorbed into broader habeas practice. The writ has no modern American or Commonwealth common law counterpart.
**Latin form variation.** Historical sources may render this phrase with minor variation in word order or spelling (*clericum captum per statutum*, *de clerico capto per statutum*). Searching the corpus under the *de clerico* prefix as well as the short form will return more complete results.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source in the Law Mind corpus with an entry for this term, and that entry is essentially a redirect: it groups *clerico capto per statutum* with related *de clerico* writs under a single cross-reference, indicating that Burrill treated the term as a member of a writ family rather than as an independently significant concept. This is a common approach in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries dealing with medieval Latin writs — the writs are acknowledged but not elaborated, on the assumption that practitioners encountering them would already be working in contexts where fuller historical sources were available.
The absence of substantive treatment in Burrill reflects the writ's obsolescence by the time major Anglo-American legal dictionaries were compiled. No entry in the standard shelf dictionaries (Jacob's, Tomlin's, Bouvier's) provides significant independent elaboration of this specific writ, though the broader benefit of clergy doctrine receives attention across those sources.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ is historically specific to English ecclesiastical and common law jurisdiction. It has no direct equivalent in American law, where the Establishment Clause and the absence of a state church foreclosed the development of ecclesiastical privilege doctrine of this kind. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal materials should treat the writ's applicability as uncertain absent specific evidence of adoption.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Benefit of Clergy; Ecclesiastical Courts (England); Writs, Historical Forms.
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