Definition
An old Latin pleading term denoting an exception or plea directed at the writ itself — that is, a plea in abatement challenging the form or sufficiency of the original writ rather than the underlying substance of the plaintiff's claim. A successful nendum did not defeat the action on its merits but caused the writ to be abated or overthrown, typically allowing the plaintiff to commence fresh proceedings with a corrected writ.
Why It Matters in Research
NENDUM is a term of purely historical significance, belonging to the formal pleading system of medieval and early common law. Researchers encountering it in Year Book materials, Bracton, Britton, or early treatises on common law pleading should understand it as a procedural device within a system where the writ was the gateway to the court. A defect in the writ — wrong form, wrong parties, wrong return date — could be fatal to the proceedings at that stage, and the nendum was the vehicle for raising that objection.
The term appears only in the earliest stratum of common law sources. It does not survive into the era of the common law forms of action as practitioners came to use more regularized terminology for pleas in abatement. Researchers working in post-seventeenth-century materials will not encounter nendum; they will instead find "plea in abatement" or specific objections to process. The continued use of the Latin and Law French terminology in Burrill (who preserves the Law French parallel "excepcion pur brefe abatre") signals that this is archival vocabulary, not working practitioners' language even by the nineteenth century.
The cross-reference to Bracton (fol. 413), Britton (c. 48), and Stephen's Pleading (Appendix, Note 22) is a useful trail for researchers: these are reliable, accessible sources for contextualizing the term within its procedural environment. Stephen's Appendix note in particular situates the term within the formal architecture of common law pleading and is worth consulting when encountering nendum in primary source transcription.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this entry, and his treatment is characteristically spare: a Latin and Law French label, a functional gloss ("exception or plea to overthrow or abate the writ"), and the three primary source citations. No additional historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry this term, which itself reflects how narrowly it circulated even within legal vocabulary.
Burrill's parallel Law French form — "excepcion pur brefe abatre" — is a useful reminder that medieval legal pleading operated across Latin and Law French simultaneously, and that the same procedural concept could appear under either label in original sources. Researchers transcribing or reading early plea rolls or Year Book entries should watch for both forms.
What the historical sources do not provide is any sustained analysis of how nendum functioned procedurally — the grounds on which such a plea could be raised, its consequences, or how it was answered. For that depth, researchers must move directly to Bracton and Britton, the cited primary authorities.
Jurisdictional Note
NENDUM is a term of English common law origin and has no independent life in American law. American pleading practice inherited the concept of pleas in abatement through the common law forms of action, but the term nendum itself did not cross the Atlantic into American legal usage.