Definition
Plegh de retorno habendo (Latin: "pledge for having a return") is a historical common law term referring to the sureties or pledges given by a plaintiff in a replevin action, securing the obligation to return the distrained goods to the defendant if the plaintiff ultimately fails to establish the right to their possession. In practice, when a party brought an action of replevin to recover goods that had been taken by distress, the court required that plaintiff to give pledges — essentially sureties or security — guaranteeing that if the action was decided against the plaintiff, the distrained property would be returned to the distraining party. The term names that specific pledge or set of pledges.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with the English common law action of replevin and the law of distress. Researchers encountering it in older pleading records, Year Books, or treatises should understand it as a procedural requirement of replevin, not a substantive doctrine in its own right. It is the counterpart obligation to the replevin bond: the plaintiff who replevied goods had to account for the possibility of losing, and plegh de retorno habendo was the mechanism enforcing that accountability.
The term is a research signal, not a research destination. When it appears in a historical pleading or court record, the researcher is almost certainly looking at a replevin proceeding and should trace the action through its full procedural arc — the original distress, the replevin, the pledges, and the ultimate determination of right. The pledge itself rarely generates independent litigation; its significance is in confirming the procedural posture of the underlying action.
Researchers using older English sources should be alert to variant spellings and abbreviated Latin forms. Replevin procedure was heavily formulaic, and the pledge language was often recited in standardized phrases that may appear truncated or abbreviated in manuscript sources.
American common law courts inherited replevin from English practice, but procedural requirements including the surety or bond requirement were often modified by statute. By the nineteenth century, many American jurisdictions replaced the common law pledge requirement with a statutory replevin bond. Researchers working in early American court records may find the term or its functional equivalent, but later American sources will typically use bond language rather than Latin pledge terminology.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental defines the term concisely as "pledges to return the subject of distress, should the right be determined against the party bringing the action of replevin," citing Stephen's Commentaries (7th Ed.) at page 422n. The entry is brief by necessity — the term is procedurally specific and its meaning is exhausted by that description.
Black's citation to Stephen's Commentaries points researchers toward one of the standard nineteenth-century treatments of English common law procedure, where the mechanics of replevin and the pledge requirement are set in fuller context. Historical dictionaries do not expand beyond this functional description because the term had no contested meaning — it named a fixed procedural obligation, not a legal concept subject to interpretation or evolution.
What historical sources generally do not address is how this requirement was received, modified, or abandoned in American practice. The shift from common law pledges to statutory bonds is a development documented in American procedural history and state statutory compilations, not in English common law dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is English common law in origin and is most relevant to research in English legal history and early American colonial and post-colonial court practice. American jurisdictions largely superseded the common law pledge requirement with statutory replevin bond provisions, making the Latin term itself obsolete in modern American practice. Researchers should consult applicable state statutes when working with nineteenth-century American replevin proceedings.