Definition
De expensis civium et burgensium (in full, de expensis civium et burgensium) is an obsolete English writ directed to the sheriff commanding him to levy from the county or borough the expenses owed to citizens and burgesses for their attendance in Parliament. The writ provided the mechanism by which members of Parliament representing towns and boroughs could recover the costs of travel and attendance from the constituencies they served.
The writ belongs to a family of medieval parliamentary expense writs. A companion writ, de expensis militum, performed the same function for knights of the shire — that is, the representatives of counties rather than towns.
Common Confusion
De expensis civium et burgensium is routinely conflated with de expensis militum. They are parallel but distinct writs: de expensis civium et burgensium runs in favor of citizens and burgesses (town and borough representatives), while de expensis militum runs in favor of knights of the shire (county representatives). The distinction tracks the medieval division between borough and county representation in the Commons. Researchers encountering either writ in historical records should confirm which class of representative is involved before drawing conclusions about the constituency or the levy mechanism.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is unlikely to appear outside of historical legal sources, antiquarian parliamentary records, or scholarship on medieval English constitutional history. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in writs registers, plea rolls, and treatises dealing with early parliamentary practice.
Several navigational points bear noting:
The writ is extinct. It has no modern procedural counterpart. Any research question that arrives at this term is necessarily a historical or constitutional history question, not a live practice question.
Coke's Institutes (4 Inst. 46) is the primary authority cited across historical dictionaries. Researchers working from secondary sources that cite this writ are almost certainly tracing back to Coke, and should consult that source directly.
The Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig. 191b, 192) — cited in the companion entry for de expensis militum — is the key writs register source for this family of writs. Researchers consulting the Reg. Orig. will find the expense writs grouped together, which aids cross-reference.
The writ illuminates a now-forgotten principle of parliamentary obligation: attendance at Parliament was a duty imposed on representatives, and the cost of that duty was assessed on the constituency rather than borne by the Crown or the member personally. This is structurally unlike modern legislative compensation and should not be read through that lens.
In corpus searches, the Latin phrase may appear in truncated or variant forms. De expensis civium is sometimes used as shorthand. The full title with burgensium may be split across line breaks in older printed sources or manuscript transcriptions. Researchers should run searches on component terms as well as the full phrase.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the core entry, defining the writ as addressed to the sheriff to levy the expenses of every citizen and burgess of Parliament, with citation to Coke's Fourth Institute at page 46. The entry is brief, consistent with the writ's obsolete status even by the time of nineteenth-century legal dictionary compilation.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry notably treats de expensis civium et burgensium and de expensis militum as companion entries in immediate sequence, which correctly signals their structural relationship without conflating them. This pairing reflects the standard treatment in English legal reference works of the period.
Historical dictionaries do not materially disagree on this writ because there is little to dispute: it is a narrow, obsolete procedural instrument with no doctrinal development. What the historical sources collectively miss is any extended analysis of how frequently the writ was actually used in practice, whether enforcement was routine or contested, and how the writ interacted with the broader medieval law of parliamentary privilege and constituency obligation. Researchers interested in those questions must turn to parliamentary history scholarship rather than legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is exclusively a product of English law and English parliamentary history. It has no counterpart in Scots, Irish, or colonial legal systems. American legal research has no occasion to engage with it except in the context of comparative constitutional history or the English antecedents of legislative compensation principles.