Definition
De excommunicato deliberando (Latin: "for freeing one excommunicated") was a common law writ directing the release of an excommunicated person from civil imprisonment once that person had made sufficient satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authority that had ordered the excommunication. Under the medieval and early modern English legal order, civil courts could commit a person to prison at the request of church authorities when that person stood excommunicated and refused to submit. Once the church certified that the excommunicant had made adequate satisfaction — typically through penance, submission, or payment — the writ of de excommunicato deliberando issued from the royal courts to compel the jailer or sheriff to discharge the prisoner. It was, in effect, the instrument of release corresponding to the earlier writ de excommunicato capiendo, which had authorized the original imprisonment.
Common Confusion
De excommunicato deliberando is regularly confused with its paired writ, de excommunicato capiendo. The two operated as opposite ends of the same mechanism: capiendo caused the arrest and imprisonment of a contumacious excommunicant; deliberando secured release after reconciliation with the church. Researchers encountering one writ in historical sources should check for the other in the same procedural chain. Neither writ should be confused with writ practice arising from civil contempt, though the functional analogy is instructive.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a narrow but important intersection of ecclesiastical and common law procedure that was operative in English courts from the medieval period through at least the eighteenth century and appears in English legal sources well into the nineteenth. Researchers working in colonial American legal materials should note that the ecclesiastical court system transplanted imperfectly to the colonies, and the writ infrastructure supporting excommunication enforcement had limited practical application outside England. The writ's relevance drops sharply after the gradual disestablishment of the relationship between English civil courts and the Church of England, and it has no meaningful analogue in modern American law.
For corpus researchers, the primary trap is encountering de excommunicato deliberando in a historical source and misreading it as a general habeas-style release mechanism. It was not. It was specifically conditioned on ecclesiastical satisfaction and had no force if the church had not first certified that satisfaction. The procedural dependence on church certification distinguishes it sharply from writs operating on purely civil grounds.
Researchers should also be alert to the abbreviated or partial citation of the writ title. Historical sources sometimes refer to it simply as deliberando, dropping the excommunicato component, which can create indexing and search confusion when the full Latin title is not used consistently.
The writ is cited in Blackstone's Commentaries at 3 Bl. Com. 102, which is the standard modern access point for its procedural context. The Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (F.N.B.) are the primary original sources for its formal writ text, and both Bouvier and Rapalje point researchers there.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Rapalje are in close agreement on the substance: the writ issued to deliver an excommunicated person from prison upon satisfaction made to the church, and both cite Blackstone as the accessible authority. Rapalje adds the Registrum Originale and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium as the deeper writ-register sources, which is useful for researchers needing the formal writ language rather than its doctrinal summary.
Neither source explores the procedural mechanics in depth — specifically, the question of what "satisfaction to the church" required, or how courts resolved disputes over whether satisfaction had in fact been made. Those questions are better addressed in ecclesiastical law treatises than in the standard common law dictionaries. Blackstone's treatment at 3 Bl. Com. 102 remains the most accessible synthesis of how the civil and ecclesiastical systems interlocked on this point.
Historical dictionaries also do not address the writ's obsolescence, which was effectively complete in English law by the nineteenth century as the civil enforcement of ecclesiastical censures was progressively curtailed by Parliament.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ was an English common law instrument with no operative equivalent in American courts. American jurisdictions did not inherit a functioning ecclesiastical court system capable of generating the certification of satisfaction on which the writ depended. References to de excommunicato deliberando in American legal sources are almost invariably historical or comparative rather than procedural.