Definition
Ne unques receivour (Law French: "never receiver") is a plea in an action of account by which the defendant denies ever having been a receiver — that is, denies the foundational fact that he received property, money, or goods belonging to the plaintiff and was therefore accountable for them. It is the general issue in account actions, functioning as a flat denial of the defendant's status as a receiver rather than a defense going to the merits of any accounting.
Common Confusion
Ne unques receivour should not be confused with ne unques executor or ne unques administrator, which are analogous general issue pleas in actions against executors or administrators denying that the defendant ever held that representative capacity. The structural logic is identical across all three, but they arise in entirely different procedural contexts and appear in different classes of cases. Researchers encountering any ne unques plea should first identify which capacity is being denied before drawing conclusions about the nature of the action.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a cluster of archaic Law French pleading formulas that survived in English common law practice well into the nineteenth century before being swept away by procedural reform. Researchers working in historical court records, plea rolls, or early American practice manuals will encounter it in the context of the action of account — itself a largely obsolete common law action that predated modern accounting and constructive trust remedies.
The key navigational point: ne unques receivour is the denial of liability's threshold condition. In account actions, the plaintiff had first to establish that the defendant stood in the relation of receiver (or bailiff, or guardian) before any reckoning could be compelled. This plea short-circuits the entire action at that threshold. Researchers who confuse it with defenses going to the accuracy of an accounting will misread the procedural posture of historical cases.
Because the action of account is the ancestor of several equitable accounting doctrines, materials on ne unques receivour can be useful context for researching the historical development of fiduciary accounting obligations, though the plea itself has no surviving procedural life in modern courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides a compact but accurate entry, identifying ne unques receivour as the general plea in actions of account and citing Reeves' History of English Law and Crabb's History of English Law as authority. Both Reeves and Crabb treat the action of account in its medieval and early modern development, and Burrill's cross-references are reliable guides to those discussions.
Burrill correctly frames it as a denial of fact — specifically the fact of receivership — rather than a plea in bar going to the substance of any claim for an accounting. This is an important distinction: the plea does not contest how the defendant handled funds; it contests whether the defendant ever held them in a accountable capacity at all.
Historical sources are largely silent on any American variant or adaptation of this plea. By the time American procedural law was developing its own distinctive character in the early nineteenth century, the action of account itself was already in decline, displaced by equity jurisdiction over accounting matters and, later, by code pleading reforms. Researchers should not expect to find this plea in American practice manuals with the same frequency as in English sources.