Definition
An Anglo-Norman and Law French term meaning a pledge or surety. In medieval English legal practice, a plegge was a person who stood as security for another — guaranteeing appearance in court, faithful prosecution of a claim, or performance of some obligation. The term appears principally in early common law pleading and procedure, where parties were required to produce pledges as a condition of being heard.
Two common phrases carry the term forward in historical sources:
1. Plegges de suer (pledges to prosecute): Persons named as sureties guaranteeing that a plaintiff would pursue a lawsuit to conclusion and not abandon it. Their names were formally entered on the record.
2. Gage et plegge (gage and pledge): A coupling of related security concepts — gage referring to a deposit of property, plegge to the personal surety — together constituting a full form of security recognized in early English law.
Why It Matters in Research
PLEGGE is an archaic form encountered almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources — Year Books, early plea rolls, Britton, and comparable treatises. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will meet this term in two contexts: transcriptions of original records and secondary works summarizing early common law procedure.
The critical navigational point is that PLEGGE does not carry forward into modern legal usage. Its functional descendants — PLEDGE, SURETY, and BAIL — absorbed its meaning across different procedural contexts as Law French gave way to English. A researcher tracing the concept must be prepared to shift vocabulary depending on the period of the source.
The formula "pledges to prosecute" (plegges de suer) is a specific procedural artifact. In early common law pleading, plaintiffs were required to name pledges on the original writ as a check against vexatious litigation. By the later common law period, this requirement had become largely nominal — the names John Doe and Richard Roe (or their equivalents) were entered as a matter of form rather than fact. Researchers who encounter named "pledges" in early records should not assume those persons had any real role; by the time systematic law reporting was well established, the pledge requirement had been hollowed out procedurally.
PLEGGE also connects to the broader early English law of suretyship and frankpledge, the communal security system under which groups of men were mutually responsible for one another's conduct and court appearance. Researchers exploring either institution will encounter plegge as a conceptual ancestor.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in compact form: "L. Fr. A pledge," with cross-references to Britton (c. 1 and c. 27) for the phrases plegges de suer and gage et plegge. Britton, the thirteenth-century treatise on English law attributed to John le Breton and written in Law French, is the natural primary source for this term and the authority Burrill relies upon.
Burrill's entry does what it needs to do for a purely archaic term: it fixes the meaning, gives the operative phrases, and points to the source. It does not attempt to trace the term into later law, which is appropriate — by Burrill's era, PLEGGE had no living legal meaning and was of interest only to practitioners consulting old records or historians of procedure.
Other historical law dictionaries (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier) do not appear to give the term independent treatment, subsuming it under PLEDGE or omitting it as a purely archaic variant. This is a minor gap for researchers: the Law French form and its procedural context are better reconstructed from Burrill and directly from Britton than from most standard dictionary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
PLEGGE is specific to the early English common law and has no counterpart in civil law or American legal systems as an operative term. American and later English law replaced the concept entirely with modern pledge, surety, and bail terminology.