Definition
De chartis reddendis (Latin: "for redelivering charters") was a common law writ belonging to the family of writs of detinue. It lay to compel a person unlawfully withholding charters, deeds, or other written instruments to return them to the party entitled to possession. In substance, it was a specialized form of the writ of detinue adapted to the particular situation where the thing wrongfully detained was a charter or title document rather than ordinary personal property.
The writ was a creature of the old English register of writs and had no independent life apart from that formal system. Its function was procedural: it initiated the action and defined the remedy. The remedy sought was redelivery of the instrument itself, not damages as a substitute.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily encountered in older English legal sources — the Registrum Brevium and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium — and in American and English law dictionaries that catalogued the writ system for historical reference. Researchers are unlikely to find it operative in any post-common-law-forms jurisdiction; the writ system was abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and in American jurisdictions through analogous procedural reforms during the nineteenth century. Modern equivalents would be found under replevin, actions for specific recovery of personal property, or equitable actions for delivery of documents.
A significant research trap: because the entry in Rapalje & Lawrence runs directly into a separate writ, De Chimino (a writ for enforcement of a right of way), transcription errors and careless indexing in secondary sources occasionally conflate or misattribute the two. Verify any citation that appears to use de chartis reddendis in a right-of-way context — that is almost certainly a de chimino reference that has been scrambled.
Because this writ concerns the wrongful detention of title instruments specifically, a researcher tracing the history of detinue as an action should treat de chartis reddendis as a specialized branch of that history. The broader action of detinue evolved, was criticized for its vulnerability to wager of law, and was eventually supplanted — de chartis reddendis shares that trajectory without generating its own significant body of reported case law.
There is no meaningful American practice under this writ. Its appearance in American dictionaries like Rapalje & Lawrence reflects the tradition of cataloguing English common law forms for reference, not active use in American courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the writ concisely as one "for redelivering charters," describing it as a "writ of detinue of charters," citing the Registrum Originale at folio 159 and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium at page 138. These citations point to the two foundational English sources for the register of writs and their practical operation. The definition is accurate and complete for a term of this limited scope. No divergence exists across the available source base because only one source dictionary covers this term; the entry is too narrow and too obsolete to have generated competing definitions.
What historical dictionaries do not supply — and what a researcher should not expect to find — is any substantial case law commentary or doctrinal development. The writ was a procedural vehicle. Its significance is taxonomic: it illustrates how medieval and early modern English law disaggregated what modern law handles as a single cause of action (wrongful detention of personal property) into highly specific writs keyed to the nature of the thing detained.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was exclusively English in origin and never took root as an independent form in American practice. Any reference to it in American sources is historical or descriptive. English law abolished the writ forms system in the mid-nineteenth century. No modern jurisdiction employs this writ.