Definition
A plea in the common law real action of dower unde nihil habet, by which the tenant (the defending party in possession) challenged the validity of the demandant's marriage to the person from whose estate she sought dower rights. The plea put the marriage itself in issue, contesting whether a lawful matrimonial union had ever existed between the demandant and the deceased, and thereby denying the foundational predicate of any dower claim.
Because marriage was a matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in pre-Reformation and early modern English law, a plea of loyal matrimonie triggered a specialized procedural mechanism: the demandant would reply that she was "accoupled in lawful matrimony" at a named place within a named diocese, whereupon the court issued a writ to the bishop of that diocese directing him to certify the fact of the marriage to the temporal court. The royal court would then act on the bishop's certificate rather than adjudicating the marriage's validity through its own fact-finding.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is functionally obsolete in modern practice and will not appear in contemporary legal materials. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in early English plea books, entries, and reports from the medieval through early modern period. Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the term straddles two jurisdictions simultaneously — the temporal common law court and the ecclesiastical court — reflecting the pre-Reformation division of authority over marriage. Researchers working in this period must understand that the certificate procedure was not a curiosity but the standard mechanism for resolving questions that the common law courts regarded as beyond their competence. The writ to the bishop was a writ of consultation in its procedural logic, even if not formally so denominated.
Second, the action of dower unde nihil habet itself disappeared from English practice with the abolition of real actions in the nineteenth century. American jurisdictions adopted varying portions of the common law real action system, and dower itself was substantially modified or abolished across most U.S. states during the twentieth century. A researcher finding a reference to loyal matrimonie in an American source is almost certainly looking at a transplanted English form or a treatise passage, not a living procedural mechanism.
Third, the plea sits within a broader network of dower-related pleading that researchers need to navigate carefully. Dower claims generated several distinct pleas and procedural writs, and conflating the grounds of defense (challenging the marriage versus challenging seisin versus challenging the heir's identity) leads to misreading of the historical record.
Fourth, the Co. Ent. 180 reference in Rapalje & Lawrence points to Coke's Entries, a collection of common law pleading forms — a primary source that remains available and should be consulted directly for the precise pleading language if textual fidelity matters to the research purpose.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only shelf source to treat this term directly, and its entry is concise but accurate in its essentials. The entry correctly identifies the action (dower unde nihil habet), the function of the plea (contesting marriage validity), the demandant's reply, and the writ-to-bishop procedure. The reference to Coke's Entries as authority is appropriate given that Coke's Entries was the standard practitioner's form book for real actions pleading.
What the Rapalje & Lawrence entry does not address is the doctrinal reason for episcopal certification — namely, that at common law, the existence or validity of a marriage was treated as a matter of spiritual cognizance, outside the competence of the temporal courts to determine independently. This jurisdictional logic is essential to understanding why the plea operated as it did rather than proceeding to a jury trial on the marriage question. Bracton, Littleton, and Coke's own Institutes provide the broader doctrinal context that Rapalje & Lawrence's dictionary format necessarily omits.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus entries this term independently, which is itself instructive: loyal matrimonie was sufficiently specialized to appear mainly in form books and practitioner entries rather than in the general legal dictionaries of even the early modern period.
Jurisdictional Note
The plea and its associated episcopal certification procedure were features of English common law and have no surviving procedural counterpart in any modern jurisdiction. American courts absorbed the common law of dower but not the ecclesiastical court structure that made the certification mechanism functional; questions of marriage validity in American dower litigation were resolved through ordinary common law fact-finding. The term appears in American legal materials only as historical reference.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See DOWER for the substantive right that loyal matrimonie was designed to defeat.
See REAL ACTIONS for the procedural context of dower unde nihil habet within the broader framework of common law real property actions.