Definition
Monstrans de faits (Law French: "showing of deeds") is a procedural step in old English practice by which a party formally produced deeds or documentary instruments before the court as part of pleading. It is classified as a species of profert — the act of offering a written instrument in court to support a pleading that relies upon it. Where a party's claim or defense rested on a deed, monstrans de faits was the mechanism by which that instrument was made available for inspection, establishing that the document existed and could be verified.
The term belongs to the technical vocabulary of common law pleading and has no continuing vitality in modern practice. It survives in legal research primarily as an interpretive aid when reading historical pleadings, writs, and early procedural texts.
Common Confusion
Do not conflate monstrans de faits with the writ of monstraverunt. They share a Latin-French root (monstrare, to show) and appear adjacent in the alphabetical run of historical dictionaries, but they operate in entirely different procedural contexts. Monstrans de faits is a pleading act by a party producing a deed. Monstraverunt is a royal writ available to tenants of ancient demesne holding by free charter, providing relief against lords who attempted to impose burdens inconsistent with their tenure. Neither term implies the other, and their adjacency in source texts is alphabetical coincidence, not doctrinal connection.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter monstrans de faits almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English pleading records, Year Books, and treatises on common law procedure. Its significance is almost entirely historical and taxonomic: understanding it requires knowing its relationship to profert and to the broader system of formal pleading that governed how parties could rely on written instruments.
The primary trap in historical sources is confusion between monstrans de faits and the related writ of monstraverunt (sometimes appearing immediately adjacent in dictionary entries, as it does here). These are distinct concepts — monstrans de faits is a pleading act; monstraverunt is a writ of relief for tenants of ancient demesne. Their proximity in alphabetical and typographical arrangement in historical dictionaries has caused them to be run together or misread.
Researchers using Law French sources should note the spelling variation: the term appears as monstrans de faits, monstrans de fait, and occasionally in Latinized forms. Burrill's entry adds the related maxim monstrat per vultum quid sit sub corde sepultum (a maxim of character evidence, entirely unrelated to the pleading procedure) in the same passage, creating additional risk of contextual misreading.
For corpus researchers, this term is most useful as a locator: its appearance in a document reliably signals English common law pleading practice predating the reforms of the nineteenth century. It will not appear in equity pleading, ecclesiastical practice, or American sources after the Field Code reforms began displacing common law pleading in the 1840s and 1850s.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) defines the term identically and briefly: "a showing of deeds; a species of profert," citing Cowell's Interpreter. Burrill's Law Dictionary agrees and adds a citation to Hale's Analysis, which places the term within Hale's structural account of the forms of action and pleading practice. All three sources treat the definition as settled and uncontroversial.
What the historical dictionaries do not explain is the procedural stakes of profert more broadly — why the showing of deeds mattered, what consequences attached to failure, or how monstrans de faits interacted with oyer (the right to demand a copy of the instrument offered). Researchers needing that context must look beyond dictionary entries to Gould's treatise on pleading or Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The dictionaries here function as terminological anchors, not procedural guides.
Cowell's Interpreter, cited by both editions of Black's, is the authoritative historical source for the term in English legal lexicography.
Jurisdictional Note
Monstrans de faits is exclusively English common law in origin and application. American courts operating under common law pleading prior to code pleading reforms would have recognized the underlying concept of profert, but the Law French terminology rarely appears in American sources. The term has no relevance in civil law jurisdictions.