Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "and of this they put themselves upon the country." This was the formal closing formula used by defendants in common law pleading to signify their submission to trial by jury. When a defendant traversed — that is, denied — the plaintiff's declaration or claim, the pleading concluded with this phrase (or its English equivalent) to indicate that the defendant was placing the matter before the jury for determination. The phrase formally invoked the mechanism of trial by jury and was the defendant's half of a bilateral submission to that mode of trial. The plaintiff's answering formula, "and the said plaintiff doth the like," completed the joinder of issue and brought the parties before the country — meaning the jury drawn from the community.
Common Language
This phrase has no counterpart in modern ordinary English usage and functions purely as historical legal jargon. No Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 entry applies.
Common Confusion
Researchers sometimes conflate this phrase with the related formula "Ponit se super patriam" (puts himself upon the country), which is its Latin equivalent. Both phrases accomplish the same legal function — submission to jury trial — but appear in different procedural contexts and periods. "Ponit se super patriam" appears more frequently in Latin-form records of criminal proceedings and early common law actions, while "Et de ceo se mettent en le pays" is the Law French form associated with civil pleading in the period when Law French dominated English court records. The two phrases are interchangeable in function but should not be treated as interchangeable in source identification, because the language used often signals the era, court, or nature of the action being researched.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is almost exclusively encountered in pre-modern English common law pleading records — Year Books, plea rolls, and early printed reports — and in treatises on common law procedure predating the reforms of the nineteenth century. Researchers working with English common law materials from roughly the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries will encounter it as a terminal formula in pleadings. Its presence signals that a defendant has traversed the plaintiff's allegation and that the matter was directed to a jury, making it a procedural marker useful for understanding the posture of a case at a given moment in the record.
Several practical traps await the researcher. First, because the phrase appears at the conclusion of a pleading, it is sometimes cut off or abbreviated in manuscript sources and early printed collections. Variants and abbreviations are common and do not indicate a different legal meaning. Second, the shift from Law French to English in court proceedings — accelerated by statute in the seventeenth century and substantially complete in formal reporting by the eighteenth — means that the English equivalent ("and of this he puts himself upon the country") supplants the French form in later sources, while the Latin form dominates in certain earlier and ecclesiastical-adjacent records. A researcher moving across this transition period must recognize all three formulations as equivalent. Third, this phrase marks only the defendant's submission; finding it in a record without the plaintiff's answering formula may indicate an incomplete record, an interlocutory stage, or a document copied in partial form.
For corpus researchers in Law Mind, this term connects most directly to materials on common law pleading, jury trial procedure, and the history of the traverse. It is a term of art within the architecture of issue-joinder and should be read alongside entries on traverse, similiter, and joinder of issue to understand the full pleading sequence it concludes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides a spare but accurate gloss: "And of this they put themselves upon the country." This is consistent with how the phrase functions in primary sources and in treatises on common law pleading. Historical dictionaries of Law French and common law procedure, including Termes de la Ley and related glossaries, treat the phrase and its cognates as standard terminal pleading formulae, which confirms that by the time these reference works were compiled the phrase was already understood as a fixed form rather than a living linguistic expression. No significant divergence exists among historical sources on the meaning of this phrase; the consensus is complete. What historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the bilateral nature of the submission — the phrase is one half of a two-part exchange, and its legal effect is only complete when the similiter is added by the opposing party.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Common Law Pleading; Trial by Jury (Historical Development); Law French in English Courts.