Definition
De quibus sur disseisin was an ancient common law writ of entry used to recover possession of land that had been wrongfully withheld through a chain of disseisin extending beyond one remove. The writ belonged to the family of writs of entry — the primary medieval real actions for recovering seisin of freehold land — and was distinguished by the degree of alienation it addressed.
Writs of entry were classified by how many hands the land had passed through since the original wrongful dispossession. The simplest form, the writ in the quo (using the Latin word de quo for a single male ancestor or de qua for a female), lay when the disseisor himself still held the land. The writ in the quibus — from which de quibus sur disseisin takes its name — extended this reach to cover situations where two persons had jointly received the land, or where it had passed one degree further from the original wrong. The phrase sur disseisin identifies the specific root wrong underlying the claim: the land was taken by disseisin, meaning wrongful ouster of the rightful possessor.
The full taxonomy of writs of entry was governed by the number of alienations since the disseisin: in the post (still further degrees of remove) lay when the land had passed beyond the reach of the quibus but before the Statute of Marlbridge (1267) and later reforms collapsed these distinctions. De quibus sur disseisin thus occupied a precise procedural slot in a graduated system that is now entirely obsolete.
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Common Confusion
De quibus sur disseisin is easily confused with two related writs. First, the simple writ of entry in the quo — which used the singular form de quo or de qua and applied only when the original disseisor, not a transferee, still held the land. Second, the writ in the post, which applied at yet more remote degrees of alienation. The three writs were not interchangeable: selecting the wrong degree of remove was a fatal pleading error in common law practice. Modern sources (and some historical dictionaries) use de quo and de quibus loosely as if interchangeable; they were not.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English sources and will surface in Law Mind corpus materials covering medieval and early modern real property law, common law pleading, and the history of real actions. Researchers should be aware of several traps:
First, the writ system it belongs to was abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 27), which the historical dictionaries reference in truncated form. Any document citing or using this writ post-1833 is either discussing it historically or is from a jurisdiction that independently preserved the form.
Second, the graduated degree system — quo, quibus, post — was a technical pleading structure. Sources that conflate these degrees are unreliable guides to medieval procedure. When reading older treatises, check which degree the author is actually discussing before applying the definition to a specific record.
Third, American reception of common law real actions was uneven. Some early American jurisdictions nominally preserved writs of entry; others abolished them by statute from the outset or replaced them with ejectment. A researcher encountering this term in American records before the mid-nineteenth century should investigate the local reception history before assuming English procedure applied identically.
Fourth, the connection to de quota litis (noted in Rapalje & Lawrence) is incidental — the two terms share a Latin particle but are entirely unrelated concepts. The juxtaposition in some dictionary entries is an artifact of alphabetical ordering, not legal relationship.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) treats de quibus sur disseisin as simply "an ancient writ of entry," with the more substantive discussion placed under the companion entries de quo and de quibus. The second edition adds the citation to Reeve's History of the English Law, which remains the most accessible historical treatment of the writ-of-entry system for corpus researchers. The Fitzherbert (Natura Brevium) and Register of Original Writs references in the first edition point to the primary formbooks from which writ forms were drawn in practice.
Rapalje & Lawrence note the writ briefly before pivoting to de quota litis — a structurally odd transition that illustrates how thin the coverage of highly technical real-action terminology tends to be in nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries. None of the historical sources provide a working explanation of how the degree system actually operated in court; for that, researchers must go to Reeve, Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III), or Maitland's work on common law procedure.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any explanation of why the degree distinctions mattered procedurally — specifically, that misstating the degree in the writ could result in the action being defeated on demurrer before the merits were reached.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ was an English common law form, abolished in England in 1833. American jurisdictions varied: some adopted writs of entry in modified form through reception statutes, while others moved directly to ejectment as the universal real action. The specific form de quibus sur disseisin is unlikely to appear in American practice after the early nineteenth century, and in most states, not at all.
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