Definition
A return made by a sheriff or serjeant-at-mace in English proceedings by foreign attachment, stating that the garnishee has *eloigned* — that is, removed or conveyed away — the attached goods beyond the reach of the officer, so that they cannot be appraised or delivered. The return itself is called an elongavit, named for the Latin verb meaning "he has removed afar." Upon this return, the plaintiff typically became entitled to proceed against the garnishee as if the goods had been properly appraised and delivered, subjecting the garnishee to personal liability for the value of the goods eloigned.
The term functions both as the name of the sheriff's or officer's formal return and as a descriptor of the garnishee's act that prompted it.
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Common Confusion
ELONGAVIT and ELOIGNMENT are closely related but distinct. Eloignment is the act — the removal of goods or a person beyond the reach of legal process. Elongavit is the officer's formal return documenting that act in the specific context of foreign attachment proceedings. Researchers encountering either term in historical records should confirm which is meant: the conduct itself, or the procedural return triggered by it.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the procedural vocabulary of English municipal courts — particularly the Mayor's Court of London and similar borough courts — where foreign attachment was a specialized remedy permitting creditors to attach debts or goods held by a garnishee on behalf of a nonresident defendant. The elongavit arose as a practical response to garnishee misconduct: if goods could not be appraised because the garnishee had spirited them away, the law needed a mechanism to prevent the garnishee from defeating the plaintiff's remedy through self-help removal.
Researchers working in early American sources will encounter the term primarily in two contexts: (1) historical treatments of English practice transplanted to American municipal courts in colonial and early republic periods, and (2) treatises on attachment and garnishment that trace procedural lineage. By the mid-nineteenth century, most American jurisdictions had either absorbed foreign attachment into general statutory garnishment schemes or had no equivalent municipal court practice, making elongavit a term of historical rather than operative significance in U.S. sources after roughly 1850.
The key research trap is treating elongavit as a general term for any return involving removal of property. It is not. It is a specific return within the foreign attachment procedure of English practice, and its consequences — converting the garnishee's conditional liability into direct personal liability — are tied to that specific procedural context. Lifting the term out of that context and applying it to replevin, attachment at common law, or modern garnishment will produce error.
Corpus researchers should also note that the underlying verb "eloign" appears in writs of replevin (the writ *de proprietate probanda* and related process), where a defendant who removes replevied goods can be said to have eloigned them. The family of terms — eloign, eloignment, elongavit — overlaps across different writs and procedures, and careful attention to procedural context is required to read historical sources accurately.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary treat elongavit consistently: the term is defined as the return made when a garnishee in foreign attachment proceedings has removed goods so they cannot be appraised, with the consequence that the plaintiff may proceed to judgment against the garnishee personally. The first edition provides the cleaner explanatory account, situating the return within the English borough court practice and describing the serjeant-at-mace as the returning officer. The second edition preserves the substance but the surviving source fragment is truncated.
Neither edition provides significant treatment of the term's procedural consequences beyond the basic statement that the garnishee becomes personally liable. Historical treatises on English practice — particularly those addressing London's Mayor's Court — provide the fuller account, but Black's entries are reliable as far as they go.
No major American case law has been identified in which elongavit functions as operative doctrine, which is consistent with the term's character as a relic of specialized English municipal procedure. The California and Connecticut citations appearing in adjacent material in Black's 2nd edition relate to foreign attachment practice generally, not to elongavit specifically.
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Jurisdictional Note
Elongavit as a formal procedural return has no recognized place in modern American practice. Its relevance in U.S. legal research is historical: tracing the lineage of foreign attachment and garnishment doctrine, or reading colonial and early American court records in jurisdictions that borrowed English borough court procedure.
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