Definition
A Latin maxim meaning "it is given to the more worthy." The phrase expresses a principle of preference or priority: where two or more claimants, candidates, or parties stand in competition for a right, benefit, appointment, or grant, the one of greater dignity, merit, or worthiness is entitled to receive it. The maxim operates as a rule of construction and a principle of allocation, appearing chiefly in contexts involving competing claims to offices, ecclesiastical preferments, grants, and inheritances.
---
Common Confusion
The maxim should not be read as a general equity principle allowing courts to redistribute rights based on subjective assessments of moral worth. Its historical application was more specific and technical, tied to formal categories of dignity, seniority, or legal priority recognized by the applicable body of law. Researchers encountering the phrase in older equity or ecclesiastical sources should resist importing modern meritocratic assumptions into its meaning.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term that appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law and ecclesiastical law sources. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in modern statutory or case law, but it surfaces in historical treatises, ecclesiastical court records, and early English reports as a background principle justifying decisions about grants, benefices, and competing claims to office or property.
The single citation in both editions of Black's — 2 Vent. 268 — points to Ventris's Reports, a collection of late seventeenth-century English cases from the reigns of Charles II and James II. That reference anchors the maxim in a specific historical moment when questions of priority and worthiness in competing claims were resolved partly by appeal to such Latin maxims. Researchers working with English ecclesiastical records, early chancery materials, or colonial American legal documents drawing on English practice may find the maxim invoked without explanation, as contemporaneous readers would have recognized it as a stock principle.
Because both editions of Black's give identical, minimal entries, the maxim received no significant elaboration or reinterpretation between the two editions. This uniformity signals that the term had already become a historical artifact rather than a living doctrine by the time the dictionaries were compiled. Do not expect later editions to have expanded coverage.
The maxim may also appear in civil law and canon law contexts, where comparable principles of preference for the more qualified candidate governed appointments to church offices and civil dignities. Researchers tracing the term through ecclesiastical or mixed jurisdiction sources should be alert to this parallel usage, which the common law dictionaries do not address.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions reproduce the maxim identically — "It is given to the more worthy. 2 Vent. 268." — with no additional gloss, context, or examples. The brevity is characteristic of how both editions treated Latin maxims that had passed out of active use: they preserved the phrase and its authority but made no effort to connect it to contemporary doctrine.
The Ventris citation is the entire evidentiary basis offered by both sources. Neither edition draws on Coke, Bracton, or other foundational authorities, suggesting the maxim's role in English common law was narrow rather than foundational. Historical dictionaries are silent on any jurisdictional variation, civil law parallels, or evolution in the principle's application. Researchers needing more than the bare maxim must go directly to the Ventris Reports and to ecclesiastical law treatises of the period.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The maxim originates in English common law and canon law. Its direct application in American jurisdictions, if any, would be confined to very early colonial or post-colonial materials drawing on English ecclesiastical or common law precedent. It has no recognized role in modern American statutory or constitutional law.
---