Definition
A historical English writ directed to justices of the bench or justices in eyre, commanding them to deny the benefit of a previously obtained writ to a party who had procured it by fraud. Specifically, the writ applied where a claimant had deceitfully invoked royal title — fabricating or misrepresenting that land was held of the Crown in capite — in order to obtain a more favorable writ than he was entitled to. The court, upon receiving this writ, was instructed not to allow the deceiving party to proceed under the fraudulently obtained writ, but instead to remit him to a writ of right, should he choose to pursue his claim through that ordinary channel.
The name reflects its operative function: pite subdole impetratur translates roughly as "it is deceitfully obtained by petition" — a description of the wrong that triggers the remedy. The writ was not a punishment for the fraud in a criminal sense but a procedural correction, stripping the party of the procedural advantage gained by misrepresentation while leaving open a legitimate avenue for the underlying claim.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a deeply archaic writ with no surviving operational relevance in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers will encounter it only in the context of historical English writs of the medieval and early modern periods — particularly materials touching on land tenure, tenure in capite, and the writ system that preceded modern pleading reforms.
The key research trap is treating the term as part of a living doctrine. It belongs entirely to the pre-Judicature Act writ regime and should be read in that context. Its significance is historical and taxonomic: it illustrates how medieval courts policed the writ-selection process, which was not merely procedural but substantive — different writs carried different rights, burdens, and standards of proof. Fraudulently obtaining a superior writ was therefore a meaningful distortion of the adjudicative outcome, not simply a paperwork irregularity.
Researchers working on tenure in capite, the writ of right, or the broader history of English land law will find this term useful as a marker of how the common law system built internal corrective mechanisms into the writ structure itself. It also connects to the broader principle against deriving advantage from one's own fraud, a principle that persists in equity long after the writ itself disappeared.
Because this term appears almost exclusively in secondary and dictionary sources rather than in primary reported cases, its corpus footprint is narrow. Bouvier draws on Cowell's Interpreter (a seventeenth-century legal dictionary), which is itself the likely terminus for primary documentation of this writ.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among Law Mind's shelf sources. Bouvier's account is concise and accurate as far as it goes, correctly identifying the writ's direction (to justices of the bench or in eyre), its operative command (deny the benefit of the fraudulently obtained writ), the specific fraud contemplated (invoking capite tenure falsely), and the alternative left open (the writ of right). Bouvier cites Cowell as his source, appropriately so — this writ does not appear to have generated substantial case law of its own, and Cowell's Interpreter, along with similar early modern legal dictionaries, is the primary documentary record.
What Bouvier does not address is the procedural mechanism by which the fraud was detected and this counter-writ issued, nor the frequency or duration of the writ's use in practice. Historical sources are silent on whether this writ was commonly employed or was largely theoretical in operation.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was a creature of English common law and has no counterpart in Scottish, Irish, or American legal tradition. American common law never incorporated the capite tenure system that gave the writ its context, so it has no meaningful presence in U.S. legal history.