Definition
A common-law pleading formality by which a party concluded a pleading that joined issue on a material fact, signaling readiness to have that fact resolved by a jury. The phrase derives from the closing words of such a pleading — "and of this he puts himself upon the country" — meaning the party submitted the disputed question to the judgment of the country, i.e., the jury of the vicinage. Once both parties had "gone to the country," the pleadings were closed on that factual issue and the matter was ripe for trial by jury.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle of "go to the country" — in ordinary modern English, the phrase typically refers to a government or prime minister dissolving a legislature and calling a general election, submitting policy questions to the electorate for resolution.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The phrase carried a related but distinct political sense of appealing to the public or the nation for a verdict on a contested question.
The gap between common and legal meaning is historically significant. In both the political and legal senses, the underlying metaphor is identical — submitting a disputed question to a broader body for resolution — but the legal meaning is technical and specific: it refers to a precise pleading act that invoked jury trial within the common-law system, not any general appeal to popular judgment. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical legal sources should not import its political connotation.
Common Confusion
The phrase is sometimes read as mere rhetorical flourish rather than recognized as a term of art with formal procedural consequences. Omitting or varying the required words — "and of this he puts himself upon the country" — could render a pleading defective under strict common-law rules. The act of going to the country is also distinct from a demurrer: a demurrer disputed the legal sufficiency of the opposing pleading, while going to the country conceded the legal sufficiency and contested only the underlying fact, committing the dispute to jury resolution.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a relic of common-law special pleading and will appear almost exclusively in sources predating the Field Code reforms of 1848 and the subsequent spread of code pleading across American jurisdictions. Researchers working with colonial-era or early federal court records, English common-law materials, or historical treatises on pleading (Chitty, Gould, Stephen) will encounter it regularly. After procedural reform movements replaced common-law pleading with notice pleading, the term essentially vanished from practice.
Key research traps: (1) The phrase appears in pleadings as a formulaic closing and may look like standard transitional language to a reader unfamiliar with its technical function. (2) In pre-reform case law, a finding that a party had or had not properly gone to the country could be outcome-determinative on the question of whether a jury trial was properly demanded. (3) The term connects to the broader architecture of common-law pleading — traverse, issue, joinder of issue — and cannot be understood in isolation from that system. A researcher who encounters it in a historical record should consult a treatise on common-law pleading rather than a modern procedural source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence offer nearly identical definitions, both tracing to Wharton as the underlying authority. Both sources agree on the essential point: going to the country was the required termination to any pleading that took issue on a material fact, and it operated as a formal invocation of jury trial. Neither source explains what consequences followed from a defective or absent closing formula, and neither addresses how courts of equity treated the concept — a gap researchers should note. The uniformity between the two dictionaries reflects the settled, technical nature of the term within the common-law pleading tradition rather than any independent analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to the common-law pleading system inherited from England and applied in early American courts. Jurisdictions that adopted code pleading beginning in the mid-nineteenth century rendered the term obsolete domestically, though it persists in English legal historical materials considerably longer. Federal practice shifted with the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938.