Definition
Latin phrase meaning "in the manner or form of an assize." Used in medieval English legal practice to describe a proceeding, inquiry, or sworn body constituted so as to resemble or follow the form of an assize — that is, a formal inquest conducted by a body of sworn recognitors called to answer a question of fact before royal justices. The phrase does not denote an assize proper, but signals that a particular procedure was shaped after the assize model. The closely related phrase in modum juratæ similarly describes a body functioning in the manner of a jury, as distinguished from a body functioning in the strict form of an assize.
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Common Confusion
IN MODUM ASSISÆ vs. ASSIZE. This phrase should not be read as a synonym for assize. The in modum construction is an express marker of analogy, not identity. A proceeding described as in modum assisæ followed the form of an assize but was not itself one of the recognized petty or grand assizes. Treating the phrase as a direct reference to the Assize of Novel Disseisin or another named assize would misread the procedural signal the phrase was intended to convey.
IN MODUM ASSISÆ vs. IN MODUM JURATÆ. Though closely related, these phrases distinguished two different procedural models. The assize model and the jury model, while converging over time, carried distinct procedural implications for Bracton. Conflating the two phrases flattens a distinction that medieval pleaders preserved with care.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of medieval procedural taxonomy, not of substantive law. Researchers encountering it in plea rolls, treatises, or writs from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries should treat it as a signal that the drafter was drawing an analogy to assize procedure rather than invoking the assize itself. The distinction mattered in Bracton's era because the assize and the jury, though functionally overlapping, were procedurally distinct — they differed in how they were summoned, what questions they could answer, and what remedies they supported.
The phrase appears in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, and researchers working in that text or in records contemporary with it will find in modum assisæ used to describe hybrid or analogous proceedings. Because Bracton is available in facsimile and edited editions, the folio references in Black's (fol. 183b for in modum assisæ; fol. 181b for in modum juratæ) are navigationally useful starting points for tracing the procedural context.
Researchers using printed abridgements or digest indices from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries should be aware that this phrase rarely appears as a standalone head term. It is more commonly encountered as an embedded phrase within entries on Assize, Jury, or Recognition. Searching for the phrase in full, including variant spellings (assise, assize, assisæ), will be necessary in Latin-text sources and early Year Book abridgements.
There is no modern procedural counterpart. The phrase is purely historical and appears only in scholarship on medieval English common law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only dedicated entry among the standard reference shelf, and it is brief: the phrase means "in the manner or form of an assize," with a companion phrase in modum juratæ noted alongside it. Both are attributed to Bracton at the folio references cited above. No other major historical law dictionaries — Bouvier, Jacob, Tomlin, or Cowell — carry this term as a separate head entry, which itself reflects the term's narrow technical scope and its confinement to the Bractonean period of common law development.
Black's entry accurately captures the meaning and correctly pairs the phrase with its companion. What it does not do is explain the underlying procedural distinction between an assize and a jury that gives the phrase its force. For that context, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf to Bracton's text itself and to secondary scholarship on the early common law of proof and recognition.
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