Definition
A writ directed to the sheriff commanding the levy of expenses owed to knights of the shire for their attendance and service in parliament. The writ authorized collection of the parliamentary wages or allowances due to elected knights — the representatives of a county — from the county itself, compelling the sheriff to raise that sum from the inhabitants of the shire. It belongs to the category of original writs issuing from Chancery and is closely tied to the medieval English parliamentary system in which service as a knight of the shire was compensated from local funds rather than the royal treasury.
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Common Confusion
De expensis militum levandis is sometimes loosely grouped with military pay writs, but the term "miles" here does not denote a soldier in the modern sense. In the medieval parliamentary context, a "knight of the shire" (miles comitatus) was a representative figure — a landed gentleman elected to attend parliament on behalf of his county — not necessarily a man serving in active military capacity. Confusing the parliamentary-wage function of this writ with writs relating to military service in the field will misdirect research entirely.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is a highly specialized writ of medieval English procedure with no modern operational equivalent. Researchers encountering the term will almost always be working in one of three contexts: the history of parliament and parliamentary representation, the history of Chancery practice and the Register of Writs, or the administrative and fiscal history of English counties before the abolition of knights' wages.
Several navigational points are worth bearing in mind:
First, the writ is obsolete. Parliamentary wages for knights of the shire fell into disuse during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as attendance at Westminster became a matter of political ambition rather than burdensome duty, and the writ disappears from practical use accordingly. Do not expect it to appear in post-Tudor case law or practice manuals.
Second, the primary source anchor is the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Original Writs), cited in historical dictionaries as Reg. Orig. 191b, 192. Any researcher seeking the full text of the writ form should go directly to a printed or manuscript edition of the Register rather than relying on secondary dictionary treatment.
Third, the writ sits within a broader cluster of writs governing parliamentary process and county administration. Understanding it requires familiarity with the medieval returns of knights to parliament, the election procedures in county courts, and the sheriff's administrative role as the Crown's fiscal agent at the county level. A researcher who has not grounded themselves in those structures will find isolated study of this writ unproductive.
Fourth, there is essentially no jurisdictional variation to consider: this writ is entirely a product of English common law and Chancery practice and has no meaningful colonial American, Scottish, or Irish parallel that would surface in the Law Mind corpus under this name.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.) defines the writ concisely as one "directed to the sheriff for levying the allowance for knights of the shire in parliament," citing Reg. Orig. 191b, 192. The entry is accurate but minimal, doing little more than name the function and point to the Register.
Older English legal dictionaries in the tradition of Jacob's Law Dictionary and Termes de la Ley similarly treat this as a reference entry rather than a substantive one, reflecting the fact that by the time the great common law dictionaries were being compiled and revised, the writ had long since ceased to be a live instrument. The absence of judicial gloss in these sources is itself informative: this writ generated no significant litigation and therefore no case law worth recording. Its interest is administrative and constitutional rather than forensic.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the broader constitutional significance of parliamentary wages as a feature of medieval representative government — the fact that compensation created a practical obligation to attend and an accountability to constituents that shaped early parliamentary culture. That dimension lies outside the dictionary genre entirely and must be pursued in historical scholarship on the medieval parliament.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Writs (English Common Law Forms); Parliament (Medieval English History and Structure).
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