Definition
Mittendo manuscriptum pedis finis (Latin: "for sending the manuscript of the foot of a fine") was a judicial writ directed to the treasurer and chamberlain of the Exchequer, commanding them to search for and transmit to the Court of Common Pleas the foot — that is, the bottom portion — of a fine that had been acknowledged before Justices in eyre. The writ was abolished along with the procedural machinery of fines and the eyre system itself. It belongs to the medieval English register of original writs and has no counterpart in modern practice.
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Common Confusion
The term contains three components that each require unpacking and are easily conflated with related concepts.
"Pedis finis" — the foot of a fine — refers to the third and bottom copy of a tripartite indenture called a final concord or fine. The foot was the copy retained by the court (ultimately deposited in the Exchequer or Treasury of Receipt) and served as the official record of the transaction. It should not be confused with the fine itself as a monetary penalty; in this context, "fine" means a final agreement or conveyance of land accomplished through a fictitious lawsuit. See also FINE (conveyancing) and FOOT OF A FINE.
"Justices in eyre" refers to royal judges who traveled circuits through the counties of medieval England. Fines acknowledged before them were recorded locally, and the writ provided the procedural mechanism to retrieve those records for use in the central courts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in two contexts: the medieval Register of Original Writs (Registrum Omnium Brevium) and secondary scholarship on the system of fines as a conveyancing device. Researchers working in either area should understand several navigational points.
First, the writ is procedural scaffolding around the fine system, not a substantive doctrine. Its significance lies in what it reveals about how the medieval English court system handled records dispersed across itinerant jurisdictions. Encountering this writ in a historical source signals proximity to questions about title to land, the eyre, and the Exchequer's role as a records repository.
Second, Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental entry is sparse. The citation to "Reg. orig. 14" points to the Registrum Omnium Brevium — the published register of original writs — and researchers seeking fuller context should consult that source directly, along with treatises on the English fine system such as those by Maitland or Holdsworth's History of English Law, which treat fines as a conveyancing mechanism in detail.
Third, the writ is abolished. It has no living procedural analog. Any modern research context in which it appears is historical or comparative. Researchers should not expect to find it in any post-medieval practice treatise as an operative writ.
Fourth, Law Mind corpus users searching for this term should be aware that "foot of a fine" and "pedis finis" appear as independent headwords in some historical dictionaries and may carry more substantive treatment than this procedural writ entry receives.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental provides the only dictionary entry located in the source material. It is a single-sentence definition identifying the writ as abolished, its addressees (treasurer and chamberlain of the Exchequer), its command (search and transmit the foot of a fine), and its jurisdictional trigger (a fine acknowledged before Justices in eyre). The authority cited is Reg. orig. 14, the Register of Original Writs.
No additional historical dictionary entries are available for synthesis. The sparseness of coverage is itself informative: this writ occupied a narrow procedural niche within a system (the eyre and fine-based conveyancing) that had ceased to operate by the early modern period. Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary treat the fine system and foot of a fine more fully but do not appear to give this specific writ independent treatment. Researchers requiring depth beyond Black's summary should proceed directly to the Register of Original Writs and to Holdsworth.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ is exclusively English in origin and application. It has no analog in Scottish, Irish, or American legal history. Common law jurisdictions that inherited English procedure did not carry forward the eyre system or the fine as a conveyancing mechanism, and therefore had no occasion for this writ.
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