Definition
CLOSE ROLLS. The enrolled records of letters close — royal letters or writs directed to specific named individuals, as opposed to the general public, and therefore "closed" by being folded and sealed so that only the addressee could read the contents. In English administrative and legal history, Close Rolls are the official chancery records on which these letters close were enrolled from the reign of King John onward. They are distinguished from Patent Rolls, which enrolled letters patent — open documents bearing the royal seal and addressed to all persons generally. Close Rolls became a primary vehicle for recording a wide range of private royal communications: grants, orders to officials, authorizations for payments, acknowledgments of debt, and instructions touching individual subjects or their property.
CLOSE WRITS. Writs directed to a particular person by name, sealed and delivered closed rather than open. A close writ is the individual document; a Close Roll is the chancery record on which such documents were enrolled for official retention. The writ of close letter type was contrasted with an open or patent writ, which was addressed generally and bore a visible seal.
Why It Matters in Research
These two terms operate at different levels of abstraction, and conflating them is a common research error. Close Writs are instruments — individual legal documents. Close Rolls are archival records — the enrolled collections of those instruments (and other letters close) preserved in the English chancery. A researcher working in English legal history or consulting medieval and early modern sources will encounter both without always having the relationship clearly explained.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, the practical significance falls into two areas. First, the Close Rolls of the English chancery (commencing 1204 under King John) are primary sources for private royal transactions and are published in calendared form by the Public Record Office and the Rolls Series. Any work touching medieval English land transactions, royal debts, or administrative history will require understanding what was enrolled there and why. Second, close writs as a procedural category matter for understanding the formal distinction between types of royal process — a distinction that shapes how writs are described and catalogued in historical legal materials.
The significance of the "closed" character should not be underestimated. The physical form of the document was a legal signal: a sealed, folded letter carried private authority directed at a specific party, whereas an open letter was public notice. This distinction tracked into substantive differences in the legal effect and enforceability of the documents involved.
Researchers using Rapalje & Lawrence as a starting point should be aware that the entry treats these terms briefly and in the English tradition only. The Close Rolls themselves have no direct American counterpart, and colonial or early American legal materials do not employ the terminology in the same administrative sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) defines Close Rolls as the rolls of the Court of Chancery upon which letters close were enrolled, contrasting them with Patent Rolls. The definition is concise and accurate as far as it goes, but it offers no detail on the chronological scope of the rolls (which run from 1204 well into the nineteenth century before the practice of enrollment was discontinued), nor does it address the variety of documents enrolled beyond letters close. The entry correctly notes the sealed, private character of the close letter as the defining feature.
Historical English dictionaries in the legal tradition — including Tomlin's Law Dictionary and Jacob's Law Dictionary — handle these terms in similar fashion, emphasizing the physical sealing and the named-addressee character as the distinguishing marks. Blount's Nomotechnia and Cowel's Interpreter both treat the letters close as a class of royal missive. None of the historical sources give the researcher much guidance on using the Close Rolls as archival material, which is now the more common context in which the term appears.
What historical dictionaries uniformly miss is the distinction between the rolls as ongoing administrative record and the writ as discrete instrument — a gap that matters when a researcher encounters the terms in secondary literature about English legal history or archival finding aids.
Jurisdictional Note
Close Rolls and close writs are categories of English law and English chancery practice. The terminology does not appear as a functional category in American law, though the underlying concept of private directed process survives in various forms. Researchers working in colonial American records touching royal grants or instructions may occasionally encounter the terminology in its English administrative sense.