Definition
De annuo reditu is a Latin phrase meaning "for a yearly rent" or "concerning an annual return." It designates a common law writ used to recover an annuity — that is, a fixed periodic payment owed to a party — regardless of whether that annuity was payable in money or in goods. The writ was available to a claimant whose right to receive an annual payment had been denied or withheld, and it provided a formal legal mechanism to compel payment or obtain a remedy at law.
The phrase functions both as a descriptive label for the underlying action and as a shorthand reference to the writ itself, which would have been styled in full as a breve de annuo reditu.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Annual" in ordinary English means recurring once a year. "Reditu" has no common English counterpart; it derives from the Latin redditus, meaning a return or revenue.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Annuity" is defined as a sum of money payable yearly, either for life or for a term of years.
The gap here is structural rather than semantic. Ordinary English speakers understand annuities in financial or insurance contexts — scheduled payments from a product or fund. The legal writ de annuo reditu operated in a distinct procedural world: it was not about a financial instrument but about enforcing a recognized property or contractual right to receive periodic payment, with the writ itself being the vehicle through which courts exercised jurisdiction over the claim.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering de annuo reditu in historical English legal sources should treat it as a procedural marker, not a substantive doctrine. Its significance lies in identifying the type of claim being prosecuted, the court in which it would have been heard, and the nature of the right asserted.
Several research traps apply:
First, the writ encompasses both money payments and payments in kind (goods). Sources that translate annuo reditu loosely as "annual money payment" may cause researchers to miss cases involving in-kind renders, which were common in feudal and ecclesiastical arrangements.
Second, the writ's breadth — covering annuities "however payable" — means it appears in contexts that modern researchers might not initially associate with annuity law: agricultural renders, church pensions, and manorial obligations all potentially generated de annuo reditu proceedings.
Third, this writ belongs to a family of highly specific common law writs that largely ceased to have practical significance after the reforms of the nineteenth century, particularly following the Common Law Procedure Acts in England. Researchers working in post-reform sources will rarely encounter it in live litigation, but will find it extensively in pleading manuals, form books, and treatises describing the old system.
Fourth, the primary citation in Black's 2nd Edition — Reeve's History of English Law — signals that this writ is best understood as a historical artifact. Researchers should anchor their reading of de annuo reditu in that treatise tradition rather than expecting doctrinal development across centuries of reported cases.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the core entry, defining de annuo reditu as a writ to recover an annuity regardless of the form of payment, with a single citation to Reeve's English Law. The entry is brief and descriptive, consistent with Black's treatment of archaic writs: it preserves the Latin phrase, gives its functional meaning, and points to a treatise source rather than case law.
What Black's does not supply — and what researchers should not expect to find supplied by any single historical dictionary entry — is procedural detail about how the writ was initiated, what defenses were available, or how courts distinguished it from related writs. For that level of detail, Reeve's History of English Law and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium remain the relevant primary sources within the treatise tradition.
No divergence across historical dictionaries is identifiable from the available source material, which is itself informative: the writ was stable in definition precisely because it was archaic and no longer generating new interpretive questions by the time the major legal dictionaries were compiled.
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Jurisdictional Note
De annuo reditu is an English common law writ with no direct American procedural counterpart. American courts adopted the forms of action selectively and incompletely, and specialized writs of this kind were largely abandoned in favor of general assumpsit and debt actions in the early republic. Researchers working in American sources should look to debt and contract actions rather than expecting to find this writ in domestic practice.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Standards of Review on Appeal (De Novo, Abuse of Discretion, Plain Error) — for context on Latin procedural terminology in legal usage generally.
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