Definition
De magna assisa eligenda (Latin: "for choosing the grand assize") was a writ in the medieval English common law that initiated the process of selecting and summoning the grand assize. When a tenant in a real action wished to put himself on the grand assize rather than submit to trial by battle — a right established by the Assize of Windsor in 1179 — this writ directed the sheriff to cause four knights of the county to be chosen, who would in turn elect twelve knights to form the grand assize. The writ was a procedural instrument, not a substantive one; it set in motion the machinery for constituting the jury-like body that would determine questions of right in disputes over freehold land.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the extinct procedural vocabulary of the medieval English real actions, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical sources treating the forms of original writs or the operation of the grand assize. Its practical significance ended with the abolition of the forms of real action in England under the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and the formal abolition of the forms of action by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852. American courts and legislators never transplanted the grand assize system in any meaningful way, so the writ has no operative American history.
Researchers tracing the development of jury trial in Anglo-American law will find this writ contextually important: the grand assize was one of the earliest formal alternatives to trial by battle in disputes of right, and the writ de magna assisa eligenda represents the procedural gateway to that alternative. The writ therefore appears in scholarship on the origins of the civil jury, the Angevin legal reforms, and the transition from ordeal and battle to rational proof.
Be alert to the organizational quirk in Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions): the entry for de magna assisa eligenda is immediately followed, without a clear break, by the maxim "De majori et minori non variant jura" — these are two entirely separate entries run together in the original typesetting. Researchers working from digital transcriptions of Black's may find the maxim erroneously attributed to the writ entry.
Primary source references in the historical dictionaries point to Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) at folio 8 and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium at page 4. Both are authoritative early printed collections of English writ forms and remain the foundational sources for anyone studying the writ in its original context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in complete agreement, offering nearly identical one-sentence definitions. None elaborates on the procedural mechanics of the grand assize itself, the historical circumstances of the writ's creation, or its obsolescence. The definitions are accurate as far as they go but function as identifiers rather than explanations.
The historical dictionaries uniformly cite Registrum Omnium Brevium and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, which are the correct foundational sources. Researchers wanting substantive treatment of the grand assize and its selecting writ should look beyond the dictionary shelf to Glanvill's Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae (c. 1187–1189), which contains the earliest extended discussion of the grand assize, and to Pollock and Maitland's The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, which situates the assize within the broader Angevin reforms.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ was exclusively a creature of English common law and had no operative equivalent in American colonial or post-independence practice. It is relevant to American legal research only in historical and comparative contexts — principally scholarship on jury origins and the forms of real action.
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