Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning not bailable — that is, not capable of being released upon sureties or pledges. A person described as irreplegiabilis could not be set at large through the ordinary mechanism of bail or replevin of the person, whether because of the nature of the offense, a specific statutory prohibition, or a judicial determination that no surety arrangement would suffice.
The term is closely associated with the Statute of Westminster II (1285), which employed it to identify categories of imprisoned persons who were to remain confined without the possibility of release on pledges. In that context, irreplegiabilis operated as a term of legal status: once so designated, the prisoner was outside the reach of the procedural remedies that would otherwise permit release pending further proceedings.
Common Confusion
IRREPLEGIABILIS / IRREPLEVIABLE / IRREPLEVISABLE: These three forms refer to the same legal condition and are used interchangeably across historical sources. Irreplegiabilis is the Latin form found in statutory and ecclesiastical instruments; irrepleviable and irreplevisable are the anglicized equivalents appearing in common law commentary and pleading. Researchers encountering any of the three forms in historical sources should treat them as synonymous. The variation in spelling reflects nothing more than the conventions of the document's author or era, not a distinction in meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is unlikely to appear outside medieval and early modern English legal sources. Researchers working in that period should be alert to two things. First, the term is architecturally tied to the law of replevin as applied to persons — a procedural context that has no direct modern equivalent, since the liberty interests formerly addressed through personal replevin are now governed by habeas corpus and statutory bail frameworks. Tracing the history of bail and pretrial detention in the common law requires understanding that irreplegiabilis was not simply an ancestor of modern non-bailable status but belonged to a distinct procedural vocabulary in which replevin of the person and bail were overlapping but not identical remedies.
Second, researchers consulting indexes or digests organized under "bail" or "replevin" may miss this term entirely. Historical digests frequently siloed personal replevin under a separate heading from bail, and the Latin form may not appear in anglicized indexes at all. When working with original statutory texts from the period of Westminster II and surrounding legislation, the Latin form should be searched directly.
The term also provides a useful anchor point for tracing the erosion of personal replevin as a liberty remedy. As habeas corpus expanded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the practical significance of the replegiabilis/irreplegiabilis distinction collapsed. Sources from the transitional period may use the old vocabulary while describing procedural realities that had already shifted toward the habeas framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and its treatment is reliable so far as it goes. Burrill correctly identifies the Statute of Westminster II, chapter 11, as the key statutory locus and provides the Latin form alongside its anglicized equivalents. The entry also correctly notes the equivalence of irreplegiabilis, irrepleviable, and irreplevisable.
What Burrill does not address — and what no single dictionary entry can adequately capture — is the procedural relationship between personal replevin and bail in the period when this term was operative. The two mechanisms were functionally similar in outcome (release from custody upon security) but procedurally distinct in origin and scope. Historical dictionaries tend to flatten this distinction by treating irreplegiabilis as simply a synonym for "not bailable," which is accurate but incomplete. Researchers who need to understand why a particular prisoner was designated irreplegiabilis, and what legal consequences followed from that designation, will need to move beyond dictionary sources to the statute itself and to secondary literature on medieval English criminal procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English legal history and has no counterpart in American, Scottish, or civilian legal traditions. It will not appear in American sources except as historical reference or in treatises tracing the genealogy of bail law.