Definition
De pace et plagis (Latin: "of peace and wounds," carrying the sense of "breach of the peace and wounding") was a form of criminal appeal formerly used in England. It lay where a private individual sought to prosecute another for assault, wounding, and breach of the peace by means of the appeal procedure — a private criminal accusation that predated and long coexisted with public prosecution by indictment. The phrase names the subject matter of the appeal: a violation of the king's peace combined with physical injury to the person.
Common Confusion
De pace et plagis is one of several named species of criminal appeal. It should not be conflated with de morte antecessoris (appeal of death of an ancestor) or de raptu (appeal of rape), which were distinct forms covering different wrongs. The broader category is simply "appeal" in its obsolete criminal sense — meaning a private accusation, not a review of a lower court's judgment. Researchers encountering the word "appeal" in medieval and early modern English sources must determine from context which sense is operative. The modern appellate meaning eventually displaced the older prosecutorial meaning almost entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the extinct procedural landscape of medieval English criminal law and will appear almost exclusively in historical sources — treatises, plea rolls, and secondary histories of English law — rather than in modern doctrine. Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the word "appeal" carries none of its modern meaning here. A researcher working through Bracton, Glanvill, or early Reeves will encounter "appeal" as a private prosecution mechanism, and de pace et plagis identifies the specific subject matter of one such appeal. Conflating this with appellate review will produce fundamental misreadings.
Second, the criminal appeal of this type was largely abolished in England by the early modern period, with formal abolition of the general appeal of murder following the Ashford v. Thornton controversy in the early nineteenth century. De pace et plagis as a live procedural form had fallen into disuse well before that point. Sources after roughly the fifteenth century that invoke this phrase are almost certainly doing so descriptively or historically, not as a guide to contemporary practice.
Third, this term connects the Law Mind corpus to the wider literature on frankpledge, the king's peace, and the transition from private to public prosecution in English legal history. Researchers tracing the development of assault and battery as common law offenses will find the appeal procedure — including de pace et plagis — as an important precursor.
Fourth, American legal sources will not use this term in any operative sense. It has no reception in U.S. law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's entries are substantively identical, all tracing to the same two underlying sources: Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (fol. 144) and Reeves's History of English Law (vol. 2). The convergence on these two citations across all three dictionaries indicates that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, de pace et plagis had no living legal significance — compilers were documenting a historical artifact, not a current form of action.
Burrill adds the cross-reference "See Appeal," which is the more useful entry for understanding the procedural framework. Neither Black's edition nor Burrill attempts to explain the mechanism of the appeal in any depth at this entry; the definition is essentially a label identifying the subject matter and pointing researchers to the parent category.
None of the historical dictionaries address the decline or abolition of this specific form, nor do they situate it within the broader transition from private appeal to public indictment. Researchers needing that context must go to Reeves directly, or to Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, which treats the criminal appeal with greater analytical depth than any of the shelf dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
De pace et plagis is specific to the historical common law of England and has no counterpart or analog in American, Scottish, or other legal systems. It is a term of art for English legal history only.