Definition
An ancient English writ directing the removal of a person afflicted with leprosy who intruded upon the company of neighbors within a parish. The writ functioned as a public health and social order mechanism, compelling the leper to withdraw from communal spaces where their presence was considered a danger or offense to the surrounding community.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal research concerning medieval and early modern English common law. Researchers should treat it as a fossil writ — a procedural form that persisted in the register of original writs long after it ceased to have practical application, and which survives in the record primarily as evidence of how the common law addressed physical difference, contagion, and social exclusion.
The writ is not a tort action, a criminal proceeding, or a nuisance abatement in the modern administrative sense. It belongs to a class of medieval writs directed at the removal of persons rather than things, and its nearest conceptual neighbors in the corpus are writs concerned with banishment, exclusion from the king's peace, and the management of those deemed socially disruptive by reason of condition rather than conduct. Researchers tracing the historical roots of public health law, quarantine authority, or disability-related legal status will find the writ relevant as an early illustration of state-sanctioned exclusion on medical grounds.
Because the writ appears in Registrum Brevium (Reg. Orig.), primary source research should consult that register directly for the formal language of the writ. Bouvier cites this source, but the entry is brief and derivative. Researchers should not rely on Bouvier alone for the writ's scope or procedural operation.
No modern counterpart exists under this name. The functions once served by leprozo amovendo have been absorbed into public health statutes and administrative quarantine authority. Any attempt to analogize the writ to modern law requires care: the writ operated through personal removal ordered by judicial authority at the instance of neighbors, not through state health officials acting under regulatory power.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary secondary source that preserves this entry in the American legal dictionary tradition, and its treatment is minimal — a one-sentence description referencing the Registrum Originale as authority. The entry defines the writ functionally (removal of a leper who thrusts himself into the company of his neighbors in any parish) without elaborating on who could bring the writ, what court issued it, or what the consequences of noncompliance were.
The Registrum Brevium, the authoritative English register of original writs, is the foundational primary source. Reeves' History of English Law, also cited by Bouvier in the adjacent entry for Lèse Majesté, provides broader context for the era in which such writs operated but does not extensively treat leprozo amovendo specifically.
No competing definition exists across the standard historical dictionary shelf. The near-absence of the term in secondary legal literature reflects both its obsolescence and its narrow scope of operation. It does not appear to have generated significant case law or doctrinal commentary, which distinguishes it from writs that evolved through judicial elaboration.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was specific to English common law and has no recognized equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It did not transplant to colonial or post-colonial legal systems in any documented form. American public health law developed independently of this writ through statutory authority at the state level.