Definition
Per plegium (Latin: "by pledge" or "by surety") is a term from old English law indicating that a defendant or accused person was released from custody upon the provision of pledges or sureties — that is, on bail or mainprise. In early common law practice, the phrase appeared in court records and writs to signal that a party had been admitted to provisional liberty upon another person's undertaking to produce them at a future proceeding. The pledges (plegii) were named individuals who stood as guarantors of the party's appearance.
The term functioned both as a procedural notation and as a substantive descriptor of the legal condition under which a party held their freedom pending further court action.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a documentary artifact more than a living legal concept. Researchers will encounter per plegium in medieval English court rolls, plea rolls, and early common law treatises — particularly in Bracton and the Year Books — where it appears as a standard formula in entries recording releases from custody. Understanding it is essential for reading these sources accurately; mistaking the phrase for a substantive holding rather than a procedural notation will distort the meaning of the record.
The concept it describes — conditional release secured by surety — is the historical ancestor of modern bail and recognizance. However, per plegium should not be collapsed into modern bail doctrine. The pledge system in early English law operated differently: named pledges bore personal liability, often in a communal or reputational sense, rather than posting monetary security in the modern fashion. The transition from pledges-by-name to monetary bail is an important arc in legal history that researchers tracing bail's development must account for.
Researchers should also be alert to the related Latin shorthand pleg. or pl., which appears in abbreviated court record entries as a contraction of plegium or plegii. Misreading these abbreviations is a documented source of transcription error in work with early English legal manuscripts.
Because the term is confined to historical sources, it will not appear in modern statutory or case law research. Encounters with this phrase in a research context almost certainly indicate engagement with pre-modern English legal materials, and the researcher should orient accordingly.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential gloss: "by pledge or surety; on bail," with a reference to Bracton, fol. 153. This is a lean entry that correctly identifies the meaning and points to the primary source, but it does not develop the institutional context — the nature of pledges as named personal sureties, the procedural role of the notation in court records, or the relationship between this concept and later developments in bail doctrine.
No other historical legal dictionaries in the current corpus carry this term. The Bracton citation is genuine and reliable: Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae treats the system of pledges at length as part of its treatment of arrest, custody, and provisional release. Researchers who need more than a dictionary gloss should go directly to that source.
The absence of this term from later English-language legal dictionaries (post-17th century) reflects the practical obsolescence of the Latin formula as common law court records shifted away from Latin pleading and record-keeping — a shift accelerated by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 (England), which required English-language records in certain proceedings.
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Jurisdictional Note
Per plegium is a term of English common law origin. It has no meaningful application in U.S. or modern Commonwealth legal practice as an operative legal phrase, though it may appear in historical scholarship and in primary sources from colonial American courts that retained early English procedural forms.
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