Definition
De arrestando ipsum qui pecuniam recepit ("for arresting the one who received the money") was a medieval English writ directing the apprehension of a person who had accepted the king's prest money — an advance payment or enlistment fee binding the recipient to military service — and then concealed himself or absconded when the time came to report for duty. The writ authorized officers to seize and detain the defaulting soldier so that he could be compelled to fulfill the military obligation he had accepted by taking the king's coin.
The writ belonged to the broader family of original writs issuing from Chancery and was grounded in the Crown's interest in enforcing military levies. By receiving prest money, the recruit entered into an obligation enforceable by royal process; flight or concealment was treated not merely as breach of contract but as a wrong against the king's war-making authority.
Common Confusion
Prest money and impressment are frequently conflated. Prest money was a voluntary (or nominally voluntary) advance payment that bound a recruit by his acceptance of it. Impressment, by contrast, was compulsory seizure of persons for service, requiring no prior agreement. This writ addresses the prest money scenario only — the person who took the coin and then fled. It does not address impressed men or those who never accepted any advance. Researchers encountering both terms in the same period should take care not to treat this writ as an impressment remedy.
Why It Matters in Research
This writ is almost entirely a historical artifact. Researchers will encounter it primarily in studies of medieval military administration, the Registrum Brevium (Register of Original Writs), or surveys of early Chancery process. Its appearance in secondary sources is sparse, and primary documentation is concentrated in the Registrum Originale and antiquarian compilations such as those drawn upon by Blount and later by Burrill.
Several navigational points deserve attention:
First, the writ is categorized under military writs and prerogative writs rather than under the more familiar common-law personal action writs. Researchers working through writ taxonomies should look in sections treating royal or prerogative process, not in sections covering debt or personal trespass.
Second, the concept of prest money — sometimes rendered "imprest" — is the conceptual linchpin. Understanding this writ requires understanding what prest money was: a form of advance payment, often a shilling or similar token sum, that symbolized and legally formalized the recruit's agreement to serve. Confusion between prest money and later impressment (compulsory naval conscription) is common; these are related but distinct institutions. A researcher who conflates them will misread the context of this writ entirely.
Third, the writ's procedural life is brief in the historical record. It appears in the Register of Original Writs at folio 24b, and Blount's Nomo-Lexicon preserves the reference that Burrill reproduces. Beyond these sources, independent primary documentation in accessible modern databases is thin. Researchers should treat the writ as illustrative of a class of royal enforcement mechanisms rather than as a richly documented standalone procedure.
Fourth, this writ has no modern successor in any common-law jurisdiction. Military enlistment, desertion, and absence without leave are today governed entirely by statutory codes (in the United States, the Uniform Code of Military Justice; in England, successive Army Acts and the Armed Forces Act). The writ itself is a dead letter.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among standard historical legal dictionaries. Burrill frames it accurately: a writ lying for the apprehension of one who had taken the king's prest money to serve in war and concealed himself when required to go. The citation to Registrum Originale folio 24b and the attribution to Blount are the primary lineage of this entry.
No entry appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Black's early editions for this specific writ under this name, though the concept of prest money receives scattered treatment in discussions of military levies. The absence from these standard shelves is itself informative: this was a narrow, specialized writ that antiquarians preserved more than practitioners ever regularly used.
Burrill's definition is reliable as far as it goes, but it is brief to the point of opacity for any researcher unfamiliar with medieval military finance. The critical gap in the historical dictionary literature is the failure to explain what made prest money legally operative — that acceptance of the coin was the act creating enforceable obligation, making this writ a remedy for what amounted to a species of royal contract breach combined with contempt of the Crown's levy authority.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ existed within the English royal writ system and has no recognized counterpart in other common-law jurisdictions. It belongs to a period predating the formal divergence of English and colonial American legal procedure and has no traceable descendant in American, Canadian, or Australian law.