Definition
An abolished English writ used to remove a prosecution from an ecclesiastical court — known as a court-christian — to the Court of Queen's Bench. The writ operated as a transfer mechanism, redirecting jurisdiction over certain matters from the church's judicial apparatus to the common law courts of the Crown. It no longer exists in any active legal system.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term in historical sources should understand that it belongs to a class of writs whose primary function was jurisdictional boundary enforcement between ecclesiastical and secular courts — a contested and legally significant line throughout medieval and early modern English law. The indicatif sits alongside writs such as prohibition and praemunire in the broader architecture of royal attempts to contain church court authority.
Because the writ is wholly abolished, it will appear only in historical records, ecclesiastical court registers, early common law reports, and secondary sources treating the history of English church courts. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth century English legal documents should not confuse indicatif with the more familiar writs of prohibition or certiorari, which served overlapping but distinct removal and supervisory functions and survived into modern practice. The indicatif was narrower in application and less frequently invoked.
No American analog exists. The writ never traveled to colonial or early American law in any recognized form, because American jurisdictions did not inherit the ecclesiastical court structure that made the writ necessary. Researchers working in American sources will not encounter this term outside purely historical or comparative discussions.
The corpus value of this entry is primarily as an orientation tool: if a researcher finds indicatif in a document, the document is almost certainly English, pre-modern, and connected to a dispute straddling secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — both editions of Black's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — provide substantially identical one-sentence definitions, each tracing back to the Encyclopaedia Londinensis as the shared authority. There is no meaningful divergence among them on substance. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow historical footprint: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, indicatif was already a relic, and none of the sources attempt elaboration beyond the bare description of its function.
Rapalje & Lawrence contains a typographical anomaly in the surviving text — a garbled sentence fragment referencing leases, counterparts, and covenants — which is an obvious transcription or printing error and bears no relationship to the indicatif entry. Researchers encountering that edition should disregard the intrusion.
None of the historical dictionaries identify the precise period of the writ's use or abolition, nor do they describe the categories of prosecution to which it applied. This silence is itself informative: these dictionaries treated indicatif as a matter of antiquarian completeness rather than working legal knowledge, which confirms that the writ had no practical relevance even at the time of compilation.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly an English ecclesiastical law instrument. No application in American, Scottish, or Irish legal systems. Researchers in comparative ecclesiastical law should note that parallel mechanisms for transferring jurisdiction from church to civil courts existed in other common law and civil law traditions under different names and procedural frameworks.