Definition
A writ directed to the sheriff commanding the release of an excommunicated person from prison, issued upon certificate from the ordinary (the presiding ecclesiastical officer) that the person had submitted to the authority of the church and returned to conformity with its jurisdiction. The writ functioned as the counterpart to the writ *de excommunicato capiendo* — where *capiendo* authorized the imprisonment of a contumacious excommunicate at the request of the church, *deliberando* ordered the release once the ecclesiastical condition for freedom had been satisfied.
The term is Latin: roughly, "for delivering up the excommunicated person." The writ belonged to a cluster of writs by which the medieval and early modern English common law courts gave coercive effect to ecclesiastical censures, lending the secular arm of the state to enforce church discipline against those who defied ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
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Common Confusion
EXCOMMUNICATO DELIBERANDO is easily confused with DE EXCOMMUNICATO CAPIENDO, its procedural twin. The two writs form a sequence: *capiendo* committed the excommunicate to prison at the church's request; *deliberando* released him once the church certified satisfaction. Researchers encountering one writ in historical records should expect the other nearby. A third writ, DE EXCOMMUNICATO RECIPIENDO, directed the sheriff to receive and imprison an excommunicate returned after escape — further compounding the potential for conflation among closely related process writs.
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Why It Matters in Research
This writ is a creature of the English ecclesiastical-civil interface and is of almost exclusively historical significance. It will not appear in modern practice but surfaces in two principal research contexts.
First, in legal history and ecclesiastical law research: the writ is essential to understanding how pre-Reformation and post-Reformation English law handled the problem of church authority over contumacious parishioners. The writs *capiendo* and *deliberando* together illustrate the degree to which the common law courts were prepared to act as enforcement agents for ecclesiastical censures — a relationship that deteriorated steadily after the Reformation and was formally dissolved by statute in the nineteenth century.
Second, in procedural history: the writ illuminates the broader category of process writs dependent on certification from non-judicial officers. The requirement that the ordinary issue a certificate before *deliberando* could issue parallels other writ structures where a collateral officer's finding was a precondition to judicial action. Researchers tracing the history of certification and the administrative preconditions to process will find this writ instructive.
A significant research trap: sources treat the writ inconsistently under variant headings. Some indexes list it under EXCOMMUNICATO, some under DELIBERANDO, and some only under the parent writs governing excommunication generally. Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium* (the standard early modern guide to writs) is the primary historical source, cited by Black's directly. Researchers working in earlier records should also consult the ecclesiastical court archives, where the underlying certificates of conformity — the trigger documents for the writ — would have originated.
The maxim quoted in Black's is also worth attention: *Excommunicato interdicitur omnis actus legitimus, ita quod agere non potest, nec aliquem convenire, licet ipse ab aliis possit conveniri* (Co. Litt. 133) — "Every legal act is forbidden an excommunicated person, so that he cannot sue, nor implead anyone, although he himself may be impleaded by others." This civil disability is the legal context that made the *deliberando* writ practically significant: release from excommunication was not merely a spiritual matter but a prerequisite to full legal personhood under the older common law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 2nd Edition provides the essential definition and correctly identifies Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium* at folio 63 as the procedural authority, along with Coke's *Littleton* at 133 for the civil disability maxim. These are the standard historical citations and appear consistently across early modern legal treatises.
Historical dictionaries are largely silent on the administrative mechanics of the underlying certification process — that is, how the ordinary's certificate was drafted, what counted as sufficient conformity, and what recourse existed if the church improperly withheld certification. For those questions, researchers must go beyond the dictionary literature to ecclesiastical court records and the canonical commentary tradition. The dictionary sources correctly frame the writ as releasing the prisoner upon the church's certificate but do not explore what happened when the certificate was contested.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ was exclusively a feature of English law and has no meaningful counterpart in American legal history. American jurisdictions inherited no established church, and the civil enforcement of ecclesiastical censures had no place in the constitutional order. Researchers encountering the term in American sources will find it only in discussions of English legal history or in treatises surveying the historical common law.
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