Definition
An English Information was a procedural device in English law by which the Crown initiated a revenue proceeding in the Court of Exchequer. Rather than pursuing a private civil action or a criminal indictment, the Crown — acting through the Attorney General or other revenue officers — filed an information in the exchequer to recover duties, penalties, customs, or other fiscal obligations owed to the sovereign. The proceeding was administrative and quasi-criminal in character: it did not require a grand jury presentment, and it bypassed some of the procedural protections that attached to formal criminal prosecutions.
The term distinguishes this English exchequer practice from the broader procedural device of an "information" used in criminal law (a charging instrument filed by a prosecutor without a grand jury) and from informations filed in other English superior courts.
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Common Confusion
The word "information" carries distinct legal meanings depending on context, and the English Information is the narrowest and most historically specific of these uses. In modern American criminal procedure, an information is a formal charging document filed by a prosecutor as an alternative to a grand jury indictment. In English ecclesiastical and common law courts, informations were also used for certain public-law prosecutions. The English Information, as a term of art, refers specifically to the exchequer revenue proceeding — a fiscal and administrative tool of the Crown, not a criminal charging instrument. Researchers encountering "information" in historical English legal materials must determine the court of filing to understand which device is meant.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a historical research marker. It will appear in materials concerning English revenue law, Crown prerogative, and the jurisdiction of the Court of Exchequer from roughly the medieval period through the nineteenth century, when exchequer jurisdiction was absorbed into the unified Supreme Court of Judicature by the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875. After that consolidation, the English Information as a distinct exchequer procedure ceased to operate as a living form.
Researchers working in early American colonial or post-revolutionary tax and customs materials may encounter references to English Information practice as a baseline or foil — American courts and legislatures self-consciously rejected or modified exchequer procedures, and understanding what the English Information was helps clarify what American revenue enforcement was designed not to be.
The term will rarely appear in American primary sources as operative law. When it does appear in American legal dictionaries or treatises from the nineteenth century, it is almost always descriptive or comparative — explaining English practice to American lawyers who might encounter it in English reports or who needed to understand the procedural origins of revenue enforcement tools.
Be alert to the sparse treatment this term receives even in historical dictionaries. Black's second edition entry is a single sentence. Bouvier and other American legal dictionaries of the period treat it briefly if at all, reflecting that the device had no direct American counterpart. This thinness in the secondary literature means that for deep research, English primary sources — exchequer records, English treatises on revenue law, and English reports — are necessary.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) defines the English Information solely as "a proceeding in the court of exchequer in matters of revenue." The entry is a single sentence with no elaboration on procedure, parties, or scope — consistent with the dictionary's treatment of English-only terms as reference markers rather than substantive doctrine.
Historical American dictionaries generally treat the English Information, when they treat it at all, as a curiosity of English practice rather than a term requiring extended analysis. This reflects the reality that American revenue enforcement developed through statutory mechanisms under Article I and the customs laws, without direct transplantation of exchequer procedure. The silence of American historical dictionaries on the procedural details of the English Information is itself informative: American lawyers did not need to litigate it, only to recognize it.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the relationship between the English Information and the broader class of Crown informations used in other contexts — a gap that can mislead researchers who assume the term is synonymous with the general informer-based or criminal-information practice. The exchequer context is the defining feature.
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Jurisdictional Note
The English Information is a term of English law with no direct American equivalent. American revenue enforcement operates through statutory penalty provisions, civil tax litigation in federal courts, and criminal tax prosecutions under the Internal Revenue Code — none of which descend directly from exchequer information practice. The term has no operative significance in any American jurisdiction.
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