Definition
A writ by which the English crown formally conferred upon a clerk the custody or keeping of a hermitage. The writ operated as a grant of stewardship over a hermitage — a small religious dwelling — typically placing a clergyman in charge of its maintenance and spiritual function. It belonged to the broader family of royal writs used to administer ecclesiastical and quasi-ecclesiastical property held under the king's patronage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records, ecclesiastical registers, and early form books. Researchers encountering it should understand several navigational points.
First, the writ belongs to a cluster of medieval instruments by which the crown managed religious houses and their occupants — a function that was jurisdictionally contested between royal and ecclesiastical authority throughout the medieval period. Collatione heremitagi sits on the royal side of that boundary: it is the king acting as patron, not the bishop acting as ordinary.
Second, the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.), cited by Black's, is the authoritative source for the writ's form. Researchers working with English legal records from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries may find variants of this writ in plea rolls, chancery records, or patent rolls. The term itself signals a collation — a formal grant of a benefice or office — applied specifically to the hermitage context.
Third, the term is a compound of two well-established legal concepts: collatio (the act of conferring a benefice by a bishop or, here, by the crown) and heremitagi (of the hermitage). Understanding each component separately helps decode analogous writs in sources where the full compound does not appear.
Fourth, this writ has no modern counterpart. The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the subsequent transformation of English ecclesiastical law rendered the office it conferred extinct. Any appearance of this term in modern legal writing is historical or antiquarian in character.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole dictionary entry among the indexed sources, and it is brief: the writ conferred the keeping of a hermitage upon a clerk, with citation to Reg. Orig. 303, 308. This is consistent with the function of collation writs generally, which were instruments of formal appointment rather than grants of property in fee.
Black's does not elaborate on the procedural context — who could petition for such a writ, what conditions attached to the keeping, or how disputes over hermitage custody were resolved. Researchers should not expect the historical dictionaries to supply this detail; it must be sought in primary sources and in treatises on English ecclesiastical law and the Registrum itself.
The entry reflects a pattern common to this period of Black's: terse identification of an obsolete writ, a one-line functional description, and a form-book citation. It is sufficient to identify the term but not to understand its operation in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was exclusively English in origin and application. It has no counterpart in American law, and no reception into any common law jurisdiction outside England is documented. Research touching this term is confined to English legal history.