Definition
An officer of the English common law courts responsible for preparing and issuing exigents — the formal writs used in the process of outlawry. The exigendary (also spelled exigenter) held a ministerial office within the court system, generating the specific writs that commanded sheriffs to demand a defendant's appearance at successive county courts until the defendant either appeared or was declared an outlaw. The office was procedural rather than judicial: the exigendary did not adjudicate but rather produced the paperwork that drove the outlawry machinery forward.
Common Confusion
EXIGENDARY, EXIGENTER, EXIGENT, and EXIGI FACIAS form a cluster of closely related terms that are easily conflated. The exigendary (or exigenter) is the officer; the exigent (or exigi facias) is the writ that officer produces. Historical sources sometimes use "exigent" loosely to refer to the entire outlawry proceeding rather than the specific writ, which can obscure this officer/instrument distinction when reading older texts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact of English common law with no modern American or Commonwealth successor. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English legal materials, particularly treatises and procedural manuals dealing with outlawry. A few points of navigational importance:
First, the term appears in variant spellings — exigendary and exigenter are used interchangeably across sources, and researchers searching a corpus should run both forms. Black's and Bouvier's both define the office under the exigent/exigi facias entry cluster, so the exigendary entry often functions as a cross-reference stub pointing to those fuller procedural discussions.
Second, the office only makes sense in the context of the outlawry process as a whole. The exigent was one step in a multi-stage sequence: proclamations, demands at successive county courts, and ultimately the declaration of outlawry. The exigendary's role was to issue the writ initiating this cascade. Researchers tracing historical outlawry procedure will need to read the exigendary alongside exigent, outlawry, and capias entries to reconstruct the full process.
Third, because outlawry as a legal mechanism was abolished in England (largely by the mid-nineteenth century for civil process, and for criminal process in 1938 under the Administration of Justice Act), the exigendary ceased to be a functioning office long before most modern legal dictionaries were compiled. American law never adopted the outlawry writ process in any systematic way, so this term has no meaningful American jurisdictional life. Researchers finding it in American sources are almost certainly reading material that is drawing on English precedent or historical commentary.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's — define the exigendary identically and briefly: an officer who makes out exigents. None of the sources devote significant independent analysis to the office itself; the substantive content in each dictionary is reserved for the exigent/exigi facias entry that follows. This uniformity signals that the definition was settled and uncontested, not that the term was richly analyzed. Bouvier's is marginally more expansive in its treatment of the exigent writ itself, noting the derivation of the writ's name from its mandatory words signifying "that you cause to be exacted or required," which illuminates why the officer drafting such writs came to be called the exigendary.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they give no account of how the office was staffed, whether it was a crown appointment or a court appointment, or what became of it as outlawry fell into disuse. Researchers seeking that institutional history will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf to English legal history sources and court records.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely English common law. No American jurisdiction adopted the exigendary as an office or the exigent writ process in any formalized way. The term is effectively jurisdictionally inert outside of historical English legal research.