Definition
De admensuratione (Latin: "of admeasurement") is the name prefix for a class of obsolete common law writs used to correct the wrongful or excessive assignment of a legally limited entitlement. Two principal writs carried this prefix:
1. De admensuratione dotis — A writ for the admeasurement of dower. It lay where a widow had been assigned more dower than she was legally entitled to receive, or where an infant heir (or, in some accounts, his guardian) had assigned dower in excess of the lawful portion. The writ enabled the heir to seek correction of the over-assignment and recover the surplus.
2. De admensuratione pasturae — A writ for the admeasurement of pasture. It lay where a commoner claimed or exercised grazing rights beyond what their common of pasture legally permitted, allowing neighboring commoners or the lord to compel a reduction to the proper measure.
Both writs belonged to the broader family of admeasurement remedies — mechanisms by which the common law courts, rather than leaving parties to self-help, imposed a precise judicial reckoning of what a claimant was lawfully entitled to take.
Common Confusion
De admensuratione is sometimes loosely grouped with writs of partition or writs of right, but it is distinct. Partition divides property among co-owners; writs of right determine title. De admensuratione does neither — it assumes the underlying entitlement exists and corrects only its excess. The term is also occasionally conflated with admeasurement of dower as a general legal concept; the writ is the procedural vehicle, while admeasurement of dower is the substantive remedy that vehicle delivered.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of almost purely historical significance. No modern jurisdiction maintains these writs as live procedural instruments. Researchers encountering de admensuratione in historical records — plea rolls, Year Books, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, or early American reports — should treat it as a marker for one of two distinct substantive disputes: a dower over-assignment or a pasture over-use claim.
The dower context carries the greater research complexity. Bouvier's note that the writ lay at the suit of an infant heir introduces a guardianship dimension that is easy to miss if a researcher approaches the record expecting only a widow-versus-heir framing. Whether an assignment made by a guardian bound the infant was a contested point, and that dispute surfaces in secondary sources but not always in the writ itself. A record citing de admensuratione dotis in a minority guardianship context requires close attention to who is plaintiff and why.
The pasture context connects to the larger body of common of pasture doctrine. Researchers working on agrarian legal history, manorial records, or enclosure-era disputes will find de admensuratione pasturae appearing alongside writs of novel disseisin and actions touching common rights. It is a signal term for those archives.
For American legal history researchers: both writs were received into early American common law in theory but generated almost no reported American case law. Their appearance in early American form books and treatises (including adaptations of Blackstone and Fitzherbert) is more significant than any practical American litigation history.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence — agree on the core definition: de admensuratione means "of admeasurement" and the two principal forms are the dotis and pasturae writs. The entries are consistent and mutually reinforcing on this baseline.
Bouvier's is the most substantively developed of the four. It alone engages the underlying legal conditions for the dower writ, citing Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Com. 186) and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (348) — both real and authoritative sources for this material. Bouvier also raises the contested guardian-assignment problem, flagging that some authorities held the guardianship assignment actionable while others held it binding on the infant. This doctrinal nuance is absent from Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence, which offer only skeletal definitional statements.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is notable primarily for a typographical artifact: in the original text, the de admensuratione entry runs directly into the separate entry for de attornato recipiendo without a full break, which can cause confusion in transcribed or digitized versions of that dictionary.
None of the four sources addresses the historical obsolescence of these writs explicitly — a gap worth noting. By the time most of these dictionaries were compiled, the writs had long ceased to be operative in English practice (the reforms of the early nineteenth century having displaced most of the ancient writ system), and they were never meaningfully revived in American courts.
Jurisdictional Note
These writs are products of English common law and have no continuing procedural existence in any common law jurisdiction. English law abolished the old writ system through the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century. American jurisdictions that nominally received the common law never developed de admensuratione as an active remedy, and modern dower and pasture disputes are addressed by statute or equitable action.