Definition
An intromittant clause is a provision in an English royal charter granted to a municipal borough that exempts the borough from the ordinary jurisdiction of the county justices of the peace. By operation of this clause, the borough's own judicial officers — rather than the county magistracy — retained exclusive cognizance over matters arising within the borough's territorial limits. The clause thus carved out a jurisdictional enclave, insulating the borough from the external county administration of justice.
The term derives from the Latin intromittere, meaning to intermeddle or to take jurisdiction over, and the clause functioned as a negative grant: it forbade county justices from intromitting — that is, intervening or exercising authority — within the borough's bounds.
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Common Confusion
The fragment appearing in some editions of Black's Law Dictionary that immediately follows the intromittant clause definition — referencing jurors balloting with the letters "N. L." — belongs to a separate entry and is an artifact of typographical carry-over between entries. Researchers encountering this passage should not treat it as part of the intromittant clause definition.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is narrowly historical and almost exclusively relevant to English municipal law predating the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which substantially reorganized borough governance and rendered this class of charter provision largely obsolete. Researchers will encounter the term primarily in:
1. Pre-Victorian borough charters and their transcriptions. These documents often employ Latin or Latinate formulaic language. The intromittant clause appears as a standard feature of chartered borough instruments from the medieval period through the early nineteenth century, and its presence or absence in a given charter directly bears on questions of jurisdictional boundary disputes between borough and county authorities.
2. Historical treatises on English municipal corporations. Works by authors such as Merewether and Stephens on the history of boroughs discuss the practical effect of these clauses in defining the reach of borough quarter sessions against the county bench.
3. Jurisdictional pleadings and ouster arguments. In historical English litigation, a party might invoke the intromittant clause to challenge the authority of county justices to hear a matter, arguing that the charter stripped them of cognizance. Understanding how courts construed such clauses — narrowly or broadly — is essential to reading these pleadings correctly.
The term has no meaningful modern American legal counterpart. U.S. researchers encountering it in historical materials should treat it as a term of English municipal constitutional law rather than importing any analogy to modern home-rule or preemption doctrine, which operates on fundamentally different legal architecture.
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia entry on integration and merger clauses (contracts_48) addresses "clause" as a drafting and interpretive category but has no substantive connection to this term's meaning or function. No directly relevant Law Mind Encyclopedia entry exists for this term.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary support in the available sources, offering a serviceable one-sentence definition: the clause exempts a chartered borough from the jurisdiction of county justices of the peace. This definition is accurate but sparse. It captures the structural function of the clause — jurisdictional exclusion — without addressing the mechanics of how such exemptions operated in practice, how courts tested their validity, or how broadly they extended across subject matter (criminal, civil, or both).
Historical sources are largely silent on the procedural dimensions of invoking this clause and on the body of case law, if any, construing its limits. Researchers should not assume that a bare intromittant clause in a charter resolved all jurisdictional questions; English courts periodically adjudicated the scope of borough exemptions, and the text of the particular charter governed.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English law and the chartered borough system. It has no direct analogue in Scottish, Irish, or American legal frameworks. Post-1835 English municipal law substantially displaced the operative significance of individual charter provisions of this type.
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