Definition
A writ of feudal English law directing the sheriff to compel the delivery of a ward's person to the party who held wardship by right of the land. Where one person had physical custody of an heir who was a ward, but another party held the legal right of wardship derived from the ward's land tenure, this writ provided the legal mechanism to reunite physical possession of the ward with the lawful custodian entitled to that custody through the land.
In practical terms: if a ward's body was being held by someone not entitled to it, the rightful guardian — whose wardship arose from tenure over the ward's land — could obtain this writ to compel the sheriff to transfer the ward to his proper legal custody.
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Common Confusion
The writ's name is closely connected to, and easily confused with, the broader machinery of feudal wardship generally. It should be distinguished from writs relating to wardship of the land itself, as opposed to wardship of the person. This writ concerns specifically the heir's body — the ward as a physical person — not the management or delivery of the lands held in ward. The two aspects of wardship (of person and of land) were legally distinct, and separate writs governed each.
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Why It Matters in Research
This writ belongs to the extinct apparatus of feudal tenure and has no operative modern equivalent. Researchers will encounter it exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources — Year Books, registers of writs, and early treatises — predating the abolition of military tenures by the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660, which dismantled the system of wardship from which this writ derived its entire purpose.
The principal trap for corpus researchers is the spelling variation in the writ's name. The form "Hjsrede" in the heading above appears to be a transcription corruption or typographical variant of "Haerede" (Latin: heir, dative case). Researchers searching historical databases should query under "De Haerede Deliberando" and its variants, not the corrupted form. Failure to account for this will produce absent or severely incomplete results.
The writ appears in the Registrum Brevium (Register of Original Writs), which is the authoritative source for its formal existence. Researchers working with that register or with its printed editions should look to the folio range cited in Black's (Reg. orig. 161) for the writ's standard form.
The broader research context is the feudal law of wardship: when a tenant holding land by knight service or other tenure died leaving an infant heir, the lord acquired both wardship of the land (right to its profits during minority) and wardship of the body (right to the heir's custody and marriage). This writ addressed enforcement of the latter right against a third party wrongfully holding the heir. Understanding this dual structure is essential to navigating related writ forms in the same corpus.
No modern jurisdictional variation exists — the writ is a historical artifact of English common law prior to the abolition of feudal tenures. It did not transplant into American law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only dictionary entry identified for this writ and defines it as "a writ directed to the sheriff, to require one that had the body of him that was ward to another to deliver him to the person whose ward he was by reason of his land," with a citation to Reg. orig. 161.
Black's entry is functionally complete for what it covers but necessarily brief. It correctly identifies the tripartite structure of the writ's operation: the sheriff as addressee, the wrongful holder of the ward's body as the party compelled, and the rightful custodian by reason of land tenure as the party to be satisfied. What the entry does not supply — and what no dictionary entry could adequately provide — is the feudal tenure context that gives the writ meaning. Researchers who encounter this writ without background in the law of knight service, socage tenure, and feudal wardship will find Black's definition formally accurate but practically opaque.
No entry for this writ appears in Bouvier's Law Dictionary or other standard American legal dictionaries, reflecting the writ's status as an exclusively English feudal instrument with no American legal history.
The Register of Original Writs (Registrum Brevium) remains the primary source for the writ's formal text and procedural context.
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