Definition
Latin: "He granted and agreed to pay." A specialized form of the action of debt arising on simple contract, available by local custom in the Mayor's Courts of London and Bristol. The action takes its name from the operative words of the declaration, which alleged that the defendant — in consideration of various sums already due and owing — granted and agreed to pay (concessit solvere) the plaintiff the amount claimed. The consideration recited in the declaration was typically fictitious, a procedural formality rather than a statement of actual facts. The action functioned as a workaround within those specific courts to pursue simple contract debts that the general common law action of debt would have handled less conveniently.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrowly local, historically bounded term. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in materials touching on English municipal court practice before the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century — particularly the Judicature Acts of the 1870s and the consolidation of common law pleading forms. It will not appear in American sources as an operative action; any American reference to concessit solvere is likely descriptive or historical.
The key research trap is conflating this action with the general common law action of debt. Concessit solvere was not a universal common law remedy — it existed by custom, not by right, and its availability depended entirely on the jurisdiction of the London or Bristol Mayor's Court. Sources that describe it without noting this jurisdictional limitation are incomplete.
Researchers tracing the history of simple contract enforcement in English law will find this term useful as a waypoint: it illustrates how local courts developed procedural variants to serve commercial communities before Parliament standardized civil procedure. The fictitious consideration recited in the declaration is also notable — it signals the broader pattern of legal fictions common to early modern English pleading, connecting this term to actions like indebitatus assumpsit and the fictitious premises of common recovery.
Because the term appears in only a handful of historical dictionaries and rarely in treatises, corpus searches should be run against both the Latin phrase and its English translation. Searches limited to English terms may miss the bulk of primary-source usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) offers identical, minimal entries: a translation, a classification as an action of debt on simple contract, and the note that it lies by custom in the Mayor's Court of London and the Bristol city court. These entries are accurate as far as they go but provide no procedural detail.
Rapalje & Lawrence add the most substantive description in the historical dictionaries, specifying the structure of the declaration — fictitious date, fictitious prior sums, and the operative grant-and-agreement formula — and confirming the London and Bristol courts as the proper venues. This entry is the most useful starting point for understanding how the action actually functioned in practice. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry appears to have been cut short in transmission (the definition trails off mid-sentence), but enough survives to identify the core features.
None of the historical dictionaries address when the action fell into disuse or how the Judicature Acts affected it. Researchers should not assume from silence that the action continued beyond the mid-nineteenth century reforms.
Jurisdictional Note
Concessit solvere was strictly a creature of local English custom, confined to the Mayor's Courts of London and Bristol. It had no counterpart in American courts and no general common law basis. Researchers working in American legal history will not find this action operative in any domestic jurisdiction.