Definition
De excommunicato recapi (Law Latin: "for the retaking of an excommunicated person") was a writ issued by the English royal courts directing the re-arrest and imprisonment of a person who had been excommunicated by the church and subsequently released from custody without having made satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authority, or without having given adequate security that such satisfaction would be made.
Under the historic relationship between church and crown in England, ecclesiastical courts possessed the power to excommunicate — formally exclude from communion — members of the church for spiritual offenses or defiance of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. When an excommunicated person refused to seek absolution and submit to the church's authority, the church could petition the crown for the writ de excommunicato capiendo, directing the sheriff to arrest and imprison the contumacious excommunicate. De excommunicato recapi was the companion writ: where such a person had been released from that imprisonment prematurely — without satisfying the church or providing security — this writ commanded that he be retaken and returned to custody.
The writ thus served as an enforcement mechanism for ecclesiastical discipline, operating through the machinery of royal secular authority. The crown's role was not to adjudicate the ecclesiastical offense but to supply the coercive arm that church courts themselves lacked.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a cluster of closely related ecclesiastical writs that researchers encounter in historical English legal sources and must carefully distinguish. The family of writs governing excommunicates — de excommunicato capiendo (for the initial arrest), de excommunicato deliberando (for release upon satisfaction), and de excommunicato recapi (for retaking after improper release) — appear in the Registers of Writs and in historical treatments of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and they are easily conflated in older sources that abbreviate or paraphrase their names.
Researchers working in pre-Reformation English legal history, ecclesiastical court records, or the history of church-state relations will encounter these writs as evidence of the practical interdependence of royal and canon law administration. The writ ceased to have operative significance in English law following the long nineteenth-century reform of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and was abolished as part of the broader dismantling of the apparatus linking excommunication to civil imprisonment — a process substantially completed by the Ecclesiastical Courts Act 1813 and subsequent reforms that severed the connection between spiritual censure and secular imprisonment.
In corpus research, references to this writ appear almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal dictionaries, registers of original writs, and treatises on ecclesiastical law. Do not expect to find it in post-nineteenth-century practice materials. When encountered in primary sources, the writ's presence is a useful marker of the pre-reform ecclesiastical enforcement regime and can anchor the dating and jurisdictional context of a document.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies the writ in its Law Latin form and describes it as issuing where an excommunicated person "had been liberated from prison without making satisfaction to the church, or giving security for that purpose," citing the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig. 67) as authority. Burrill's treatment is characteristically spare — a compressed functional description without historical narrative — but it is accurate in its essentials and correctly situates the writ within the Register of Writs tradition.
The historical dictionaries generally treat the de excommunicato writs as a group, and Burrill's entry reflects the broader pattern: these instruments are defined procedurally rather than doctrinally, because their significance was entirely operational. No historical source reviewed offers extended analysis of the writ's jurisprudential basis; the assumption throughout is that the reader already understands the church-crown enforcement compact and needs only the writ's specific occasion and effect.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the abolition history or the reasons the writ fell out of use — a significant gap for researchers who need to understand when and why these instruments disappeared from practice.
Jurisdictional Note
De excommunicato recapi was a writ of English law, rooted in the particular constitutional relationship between the Church of England and the crown. It has no counterpart in American law, where the First Amendment's separation of church and state precluded any such civil enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline. Researchers encountering analogous concepts in other jurisdictions should treat them as distinct institutions arising from different church-state frameworks.