Definition
A historical writ of English law directed at the arrest of a person who had accepted the king's money as payment to serve in a military campaign and then concealed himself to avoid that service. The name derives from the Latin for "he received the money" — describing the central act that gave rise to the writ's issuance. Once a person accepted royal funds for military service, an obligation attached. Evasion of that obligation was not merely a breach of personal honor but a wrong against the Crown, and the writ provided the legal mechanism to compel compliance or arrest the offender.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely confined to early English legal history and will appear primarily in sources dealing with prerogative writs, military tenure obligations, and the administrative machinery of medieval and early modern English governance. Researchers encountering this term in archival or historical legal materials should treat it as a marker of royal military administration rather than ordinary civil or criminal procedure. It belongs to a cluster of obsolete writs connected to the Crown's power to raise armies and enforce service obligations — a context that intersects with villeinage, knight service, and impressment, but is distinct from each.
The term will not appear in American legal materials, as the writ was a product of English royal prerogative with no transplant into colonial or post-independence American law. Researchers working in English legal history should note that the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) is the primary source where this writ appears, and that source must be used cautiously — it records forms of writs as they existed at particular historical moments, not necessarily as they were applied uniformly across time or jurisdiction.
Cross-referencing within the Law Mind corpus should focus on companion writs relating to military obligation and royal prerogative. Researchers may also find relevant context in materials on impressment and the broader history of writs of arrest issuing from Crown authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary treatment of this term and is notably spare: "A writ which lay for the arrest of one who had taken the king's money to serve in the war, and hid himself to escape going. Reg. Orig. 24b." This definition is functional but tells us little about the writ's procedural mechanics, the forum in which it was obtained, or the consequences for the person arrested. Black's citation to the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 24b) is the entry's primary value — pointing researchers directly to the original source rather than relying on secondary elaboration.
No competing or divergent treatment exists in the available historical dictionary sources, so there is nothing to reconcile. The term is one of a large class of highly specific Latin writ names that historical dictionaries preserve as catalog entries rather than living concepts. Researchers should not expect to find substantive doctrinal development across editions of Black's or comparable works — this writ does not evolve; it simply survives in the record.
Jurisdictional Note
English law only. This writ was an instrument of the English Crown's prerogative power and has no equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It is properly understood as a historical artifact of medieval and early modern English military administration.