Definition
"Continuing his said assault there" is a formal pleading phrase used in common law indictments and civil declarations to allege that a defendant, having begun an assault in one location or manner already described in the pleading, carried that assault forward without interruption. The phrase functions as a continuando — a Latin pleading device asserting that a wrongful act was not a single, isolated event but rather an ongoing or repeated act constituting one continuous wrong.
In practice, the phrase appeared most frequently in trespass and assault indictments when the pleader wished to charge a course of conduct rather than a single blow or momentary act. By inserting "continuing his said assault there," the drafter signaled that the act described in the preceding clause carried forward into the acts about to be described, preserving the legal unity of the offense or wrong across time and conduct without being required to plead each repetition as a separate count.
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Common Confusion
This phrase is sometimes read as mere rhetorical filler in archaic pleadings, but it carries substantive legal weight. It is a continuando, and its presence or absence in a pleading could affect whether a defendant could argue that additional acts charged were separate offenses requiring separate counts, or whether the plaintiff or prosecution could recover for or punish the full range of conduct as one unified wrong. Confusing it with ordinary narrative transition language leads to misreading the legal theory embedded in the charge.
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Core Elements
For the continuando to function as intended, the phrase required the following conditions to be met in the surrounding pleading:
1. A prior assault already alleged. The "said assault" must refer back to a specific act already charged in the same count or pleading. The continuando has no independent force; it is a connective.
2. Unity of place. The word "there" anchors the continuing act to the location already specified. This was not decorative — it prevented the defendant from arguing that the conduct described next was a separate transaction at a different place and time.
3. Temporal continuity. The construction implies an unbroken thread of conduct. If the pleader introduced a gap in time or a different occasion, the continuando language was technically inapt and could be challenged.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical indictments, civil declarations, or pleading precedents should recognize it as a technical continuando and read it accordingly. Its presence reframes how the surrounding allegations function: the pleader is constructing a single, legally unified course of conduct, not stringing together independent acts.
The phrase matters for corpus research in several ways. First, it is a marker of common law pleading form, most prevalent in sources predating code pleading reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Once code pleading displaced common law forms — beginning with the New York Field Code of 1848 and spreading through most American jurisdictions over the following decades — this precise formulation disappeared from live practice. It survives in form books, precedent collections, and historical indictments but not in modern pleadings.
Second, the underlying concept did not disappear with the phrase. Continuing offense doctrine, continuous tort theory, and ongoing trespass theories all carry forward the same conceptual work this phrase performed. A researcher tracing the history of continuing offense doctrine or assault law should treat occurrences of this phrase as early expressions of that doctrine, even though the modern cases will use entirely different vocabulary.
Third, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry connecting "continuing" concepts — continuing offense, continuous adverse use, continuando — signals that nineteenth-century legal writers understood this cluster of terms as related. Researchers should cross-reference entries under continuando, continuing offense, and continuing trespass when working with any of these phrases.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence does not provide a standalone entry for "continuing his said assault there" as a discrete phrase, but the dictionary's treatment of neighboring terms illuminates the legal context. Entries for "afterward (not within the meaning of a continuando)" and "continuing offence" confirm that the continuando concept was actively litigated in this period and that courts carefully scrutinized whether pleading language actually achieved the continuous quality the drafter intended. The Massachusetts case noted in connection with "afterward" (2 Mass. 50) reflects judicial skepticism about loose temporal language being read as a proper continuando — a caution directly relevant to interpreting "continuing his said assault there."
The phrase itself represents a settled common law pleading formula rather than a term requiring definition, which explains why the dictionaries treat it through its component concepts rather than as a headword. Historical treatises on pleading, particularly Chitty's Pleading and Stephen's Principles of Pleading, would be the appropriate shelf sources for full treatment of continuando doctrine and the assault pleading forms in which this phrase appeared.
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Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is a product of common law pleading forms shared across English and American jurisdictions before code pleading reform. Variations in local pleading rules affected how strictly courts enforced the continuando requirements, but the underlying doctrine was substantially uniform. Modern jurisdictions have no direct equivalent in pleading practice, though continuing offense and continuing tort doctrines serve analogous functions.
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