Definition
A writ of latitat was a process used in old English common law practice to compel the appearance of a defendant in personal actions before the Court of King's Bench. It issued when a prior writ — the bill of Middlesex — had been returned with the notation non est inventus ("he is not found"), meaning the sheriff could not locate the defendant within Middlesex County. The latitat followed on the fiction that the defendant was hiding (latitat) and wandering outside Middlesex into another county, and commanded the sheriff of that county to take the defendant and have him before the court on a specified day.
The writ's name derives from the Latin latitat, meaning "he lurks" or "he hides," which was the operative word in the writ's recital. The full formula typically averred that the defendant "lurks and wanders about" — a legal fiction that persisted long after it bore any relationship to actual fact.
The latitat was largely a procedural workaround. The Court of King's Bench had jurisdiction over defendants found within Middlesex by virtue of the bill of Middlesex, but needed a mechanism to reach defendants elsewhere. The latitat supplied that mechanism through fiction. It was abolished along with the broader system of fictitious process reforms in the nineteenth century, particularly in the wake of the reforms culminating in the Uniformity of Process Act 1832 and the subsequent structural changes to English superior courts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A writ based upon the presumption that the person summoned was hiding; also, colloquially, a lawyer.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A writ based upon the presumption that the person summoned was hiding.
The colloquial use of "latitat" to mean a lawyer — recorded in Wiktionary — appears to be an archaic jest, likely derived from the legal fiction that the defendant "lurks and hides," applied satirically to the legal profession. This meaning has no operative legal significance and does not appear in any legal dictionary source. Researchers encountering the term in historical non-legal texts should not assume a procedural meaning.
Common Confusion
Latitat is sometimes conflated with the bill of Middlesex, but the two writs were sequential and distinct. The bill of Middlesex was the initiating process, grounded in the fiction that the defendant had committed a trespass in Middlesex and was therefore within the court's reach. Only after the bill of Middlesex was returned non est inventus did the latitat issue to pursue the defendant into another county. Neither writ should be confused with a capias, though all three belong to the family of personal arrest process: capias was the general form; the bill of Middlesex and latitat were King's Bench-specific instruments built on layered fictions.
Why It Matters in Research
The latitat is almost entirely a pre-nineteenth-century English common law phenomenon. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
Historical English practice materials, particularly pre-1832 treatises on King's Bench procedure. It appears with some frequency in commentary on the jurisdictional competition between King's Bench and Common Pleas, where the latitat was a tool by which King's Bench expanded its reach in personal actions at the expense of Common Pleas.
Early American legal materials require caution. Colonial and early republic American courts sometimes adopted or adapted English process, but the latitat was not uniformly transplanted. Its appearance in American sources is sparse and typically historical or descriptive rather than operative.
The fictional scaffolding matters for understanding the writ. The latitat was not a writ about actual hiding — it was a legal fiction that the courts and practitioners understood as such. Reading its recitals literally misrepresents the practice. When Blackstone and others describe the writ, they are documenting an entrenched procedural convention, not an empirical assertion about defendant behavior.
Abolition is a research endpoint, not a continuing story. After the 1830s English procedural reforms, the latitat ceased to be used. Any reference to the writ in materials after that period is retrospective. Researchers should not expect to find the latitat in live procedural contexts in modern or late Victorian sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) defines latitat consistently as a writ issuing in personal actions on return of non est inventus to a bill of Middlesex, characterized by the recital that the defendant "lurks and wanders about." This formulation is stable across both editions and aligns with Blackstone's description referenced in Webster's 1913.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry appears at page 729 but the source material available here is fragmentary. The placement in their dictionary — a work oriented toward practitioners with historical depth — suggests they treated latitat as a reference term rather than an active procedural tool, consistent with its obsolete status by the time of their publication.
None of the historical dictionary sources explore the jurisdictional politics underlying the latitat's development — the rivalry between King's Bench and Common Pleas that made fictitious process strategically valuable. Researchers seeking that dimension should consult Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III) and Holdsworth's History of English Law, which address the institutional context the dictionaries omit.
Jurisdictional Note
The latitat was specific to the Court of King's Bench in England and was abolished as part of nineteenth-century procedural reform. It was not adopted as a named writ in American federal practice or in most state systems, which developed their own process for securing defendant appearance. Its relevance to American legal research is almost entirely historical and comparative.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Bill of Middlesex; Writs, History of Personal Process; Court of King's Bench