Definition
De peramblatione facienda (Latin: "for making a perambulation") was a common law writ commanding the sheriff to assemble twelve discreet and lawful knights from the county and formally walk the disputed boundary line between two adjacent lordships or towns, thereby establishing and certifying the bounds in legal certainty. The writ issued where neighboring landowners or communities could not agree on where one territory ended and another began. Upon completion, the perambulation — the physical act of walking the boundary — was recorded and served as authoritative evidence of the boundary's location.
The writ was directed to the sheriff, not to a court, making it an executive or administrative remedy rather than a purely judicial one. The sheriff's jury of twelve knights physically traversed the contested ground, observed landmarks, and rendered a determination that resolved the dispute without the full machinery of a plenary land action.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a highly specialized historical writ with no modern procedural equivalent. Researchers encountering the term in medieval or early common law materials should understand it as belonging to the family of original writs — commands issuing from the Crown through Chancery to a local officer — rather than to the family of judicial writs running between courts.
The term appears rarely in American legal materials, but Bouvier notes a cognate statutory procedure surviving in Connecticut for the resolution of town-line disputes, suggesting that the underlying function — boundary determination by a locally empaneled body — was transplanted into early American practice even where the Latin writ form was abandoned. Researchers working in New England colonial or early state records should watch for this procedural inheritance, which may appear under anglicized or statutory language rather than the original Latin form.
The writ is closely related to the broader category of perambulation as a legal act. Perambulation of parish or manor bounds was a regularized practice in English law with both ecclesiastical and secular dimensions (the Rogationtide beating of the bounds being its ceremonial counterpart). Legal records referencing perambulations may therefore appear in ecclesiastical court records, manorial rolls, or sheriff's returns as well as in common law court files. Researchers should not assume that all boundary perambulation records will appear in a single record series.
Because this writ predates the systematization of English land law and sits outside the standard forms treated at length in Blackstone or the later common law treatises, its coverage in American legal dictionaries is thin. Bouvier's entry, derived from Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, is the primary American dictionary source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the standard shelf sources. Bouvier draws directly from Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (folio 309 D), the fifteenth-century register of writs, which is the authoritative pre-modern source for the writ's form and function. Bouvier's entry is accurate as far as it goes but is notably brief, and the Fitzherbert citation should be followed for full procedural detail.
No entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary (early editions) or in Burrill's Law Dictionary for this specific writ. The absence reflects the writ's obsolescence by the time American legal dictionaries were being systematically compiled. Tomlin's Law Dictionary and Jacob's Law Dictionary, the principal English predecessors to the American works, treat perambulation as a concept but do not give this writ a dedicated entry, instead folding the discussion into broader treatments of boundary and metes.
The Bouvier note regarding Connecticut is significant: it reflects a pattern common to early American legal adaptation, in which the function of an obsolete English writ was preserved by statute under new procedural clothing. Researchers should treat this as a signal to investigate the early Connecticut statutory record rather than as a precise citation.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was an English common law form and as such has no direct descendant in modern American federal or state procedure. Connecticut's early statutory analog, noted by Bouvier, appears to be the closest surviving American cognate. Boundary dispute resolution in modern American law proceeds through quiet title actions, surveying statutes, and administrative boundary commissions, none of which trace formal procedural lineage to this writ.