Definition
Cordi (also rendered as *de cordi*) is an archaic Latin writ directing that the tenor of a record be sent or exemplified under the great seal. In practice, it functioned as a mechanism for transmitting or certifying the substance of a judicial or official record, authenticated at the highest level of royal authority. The writ is closely associated with the broader category of writs of certiorari and record-transmission procedures in early English practice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively extinct in modern practice and will appear only in pre-modern English legal materials — primarily Year Books, early plea rolls, and register-of-writs literature. Researchers encountering *cordi* in historical sources should understand it as a record-authentication device, not a substantive writ going to the merits of a case. The writ's significance lies in procedure: it concerns how courts and chancery transmitted certified copies of proceedings, a function now handled through entirely different mechanisms (certified transcripts, exemplification under seal, and court-issued copies).
The primary trap for researchers is conflating *cordi* with *certiorari*. Both writs concern the movement of records between courts or to higher authority, but their technical scope and procedural posture differ in early common law practice. When reading the Registrum Omnium Brevium or related register sources, *cordi* appears in a cluster of writs dealing with record exemplification that require careful distinction from removal writs proper.
Because this term has no meaningful modern survival, searching modern legal databases will return nothing useful. Research must proceed through primary sources (the Registrum Brevium and its printed editions), early chancery records, and secondary treatments of medieval English procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the sole substantive entry among standard reference works: "A writ to send the tenor of a record, or to exemplify it under the great seal. Reg. Orig. 220b." This definition is terse but accurate as far as it goes. The citation to the *Registrum Originale* (Reg. Orig.) grounds the writ firmly in chancery practice and the writs register tradition.
No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Bouvier, Tomlin's, nor Jacob's — carries a meaningful entry for *cordi* as a standalone term. This absence itself is informative: the writ was sufficiently obscure even by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that compilers of English and American legal dictionaries either omitted it or absorbed its function into broader discussions of certiorari and record practice. Researchers should treat Black's single-sentence entry as the outer boundary of standard reference-work support and go directly to the Registrum and chancery scholarship for anything beyond it.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is a creature of English common law and chancery practice with no American common law reception of any significance. It will not appear in American state or federal sources. Research is bounded to English materials, primarily medieval through early modern.