Definition
Placitum commune (Latin: "common plea") is a term from old English law denoting a civil action or plea of a private nature between subject and subject — as distinguished from pleas of the Crown, which were criminal matters touching the sovereign's interest. A placitum commune was the ordinary lawsuit through which private parties litigated disputes such as debt, land, and personal actions before the common law courts. The term is most significant in connection with Magna Carta's command that common pleas not follow the king's court (curia regis) from place to place, but instead be held in a fixed location — a provision that gave rise to the Court of Common Pleas as a distinct, permanent tribunal.
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Common Confusion
PLACITUM COMMUNE vs. PLACITUM CORONAE: These are the two primary categories of plea in early English law. Placitum coronae ("plea of the Crown") encompassed criminal and quasi-criminal matters — offenses against the king's peace, felonies, and the like. Placitum commune covered private civil disputes between subjects. Researchers encountering the unmodified term "placitum" in medieval or early modern sources should determine which category is intended, as the procedural rules, courts of competent jurisdiction, and consequences differed fundamentally between the two.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term anchors one of the most consequential provisions in English constitutional history. Chapter 17 of Magna Carta (1215) — "Communia placita non sequantur curiam nostram sed teneantur in aliquo loco certo" ("Common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place") — is the direct textual source for the institutional separation of the Court of Common Pleas from the itinerant royal court. Researchers working in:
— Medieval and early modern procedure: Placitum commune defines the jurisdictional boundary between Common Pleas and King's Bench. King's Bench claimed jurisdiction over nominally "criminal" matters and used procedural fictions (the Bill of Middlesex, latitat) to draw common pleas business away from Common Pleas. Understanding placitum commune helps researchers trace why those fictions were necessary and how the jurisdictional rivalry between the two courts developed across centuries.
— Constitutional history: The term is a touchstone in scholarship on Magna Carta's practical operation. The "fixed place" requirement was not merely symbolic — it was litigated and invoked as a substantive limitation on royal judicial power throughout the medieval period.
— Equity research: The distinction between common pleas and Crown pleas partly informed the original jurisdictional boundaries of Chancery, which developed to address matters that neither category handled adequately.
Trap for historical researchers: Latin legal terms in medieval English records are frequently abbreviated, truncated, or used in formulaic recitations. "Placitum" alone may appear in plea rolls without the qualifier "commune" or "coronae." Context — the nature of the parties, the court, and the subject matter — must supply the missing category.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core definition and supplies the essential Magna Carta context, quoting the reasoning that "a plea of debt is a kind of common plea" and that common pleas, per the Charter of Liberty, must be held in a fixed place rather than following the king's court. The entry, though brief, correctly identifies the institutional significance of the term.
What Burrill does not develop: the longer history of how the Court of Common Pleas actually enforced (and failed to enforce) this Magna Carta right against King's Bench encroachments, and how the term fell out of active use as the old forms of action were abolished by the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875, which also formally merged the common law superior courts. By the time Burrill's dictionary was compiled, placitum commune was already an antiquarian term — alive in historical legal scholarship but dead in practice.
Historical sources generally agree that the term refers to civil private-party litigation. No significant divergence appears across the historical dictionaries on this basic meaning.
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Jurisdictional Note
Placitum commune is a term specific to English common law history and has no operative counterpart in American law. Its significance in American legal research is confined to constitutional history, the inheritance of common law procedure, and scholarly work on the English antecedents of American courts. The Magna Carta provision underlying the term is occasionally invoked in American constitutional argument regarding the right to a fixed and accessible forum, though no direct American doctrinal lineage runs from the term itself.
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