Definition
Et ei legitur in hæc verba is a Latin phrase meaning "and it is read to him in these words." It was a formal recital used in common law pleading records to indicate that a document — typically a deed, bond, or other written instrument — had been read aloud to the party who had prayed oyer of it, and that the document's exact text followed in the record.
The phrase appears in the context of oyer, a procedural device by which a party in a pleading action could demand that the opposing party read aloud and place on record any written instrument upon which the opposing party's pleading was founded. Once oyer was granted and the instrument read, the clerk recorded this phrase to introduce the verbatim text of the document into the formal record. The entry served as a precise marker: what followed was not a summary or description but the literal words of the instrument itself.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is an artifact of the formal pleading record in English common law and its early American counterpart. Researchers encountering it in historical court records, plea rolls, or printed reports should understand that it signals a verbatim transcription of an instrument embedded within the pleading — not a reference to external evidence. What follows the phrase in the record is the controlling text of the document for purposes of that pleading stage.
The phrase matters most when tracing the content of instruments in cases where the original document no longer survives. Because oyer required the verbatim text to be spread on the record, the plea rolls or reported cases that include this phrase may preserve the only surviving copy of a deed, bond, obligation, or similar instrument. Researchers working in early modern English or colonial American legal records should treat the text following this entry with care, as it functions as a documentary source, not merely a procedural notation.
The phrase becomes invisible in post-pleading-reform records. With the abolition of common law forms of pleading in England under the Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and in most American jurisdictions through the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, oyer as a formal pleading device disappeared, and with it this recital. Researchers should not expect to encounter it in records after roughly the second half of the nineteenth century.
Be alert to variant spellings in manuscript sources. The ligature æ in hæc is frequently rendered as haec, hec, or abbreviated, and the letter z in hzc (as it appears in some printed abridgements) is a common typographical substitute for the æ ligature, not a separate letter. Black's 2nd edition itself reflects this substitution in its headword. The phrase should be treated as a single unit regardless of spelling variation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.) is the sole dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is brief: "And it is read to him in these words. Words formerly used in entering the prayer of oyer on record." The use of "formerly" is important — even by the early twentieth century, Black's recognized the phrase as a historical artifact of superseded pleading practice rather than living doctrine.
No additional historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus provide separate entries for this phrase. Its significance is therefore best recovered through the entries on OYER and on pleading practice generally, where the formal mechanics of demanding and recording instruments are explained in fuller context. Researchers relying solely on dictionary sources will find this phrase underexplained; treatises on common law pleading — Chitty's Treatise on Pleading, Stephen's Principles of Pleading — provide the procedural architecture within which the phrase operated.
The typographical rendering of hæc as hzc deserves explicit notice. It is not a distinct variant phrase. It is a product of movable-type printing conventions in which the æ ligature was substituted with a z in certain fonts or abridgements, and researchers should not treat hzc verba as a separate locution from hæc verba.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Oyer and Oyer and Terminer; Common Law Pleading.