Definition
Pone per vadium (Latin: "put by gage and safe pledges") was a writ in early English practice directed to the sheriff, commanding him to summon a defendant to appear and answer a plaintiff's suit upon the defendant's providing sureties to prosecute. The writ took its name from its operative words: *pone per vadium et salvos plegios* — "put by gage and safe pledges" — followed by the defendant's name. It was a mechanism for compelling a defendant's appearance in court through the posting of security rather than through arrest or personal compulsion alone.
The writ is obsolete. It belongs to the pre-modern English common law procedural framework and has no surviving counterpart in contemporary practice.
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Common Confusion
The term should not be confused with the writ of *capias* or other writs of arrest, which compelled a defendant's appearance through physical seizure. Pone per vadium operated through a pledge or surety mechanism — the defendant was bound by security, not seized. Researchers encountering writs of appearance in early English records should identify which compulsory mechanism was invoked, as the distinction affects what the surrounding record will reveal about the defendant's status, means, and procedural position.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law records — plea rolls, Year Books, or treatises predating the 18th century — may encounter pone per vadium in its procedural context. Its presence in a record signals a specific stage of litigation: the plaintiff had initiated suit and the court or sheriff was engaged in the process of compelling the defendant's appearance. Understanding that this writ required the defendant to produce sureties means that associated records may identify pledges or guarantors, which can be genealogically or legally significant in historical research.
Because both Black's editions label the writ obsolete without qualification, researchers should not expect to find it in any American or post-reform English procedural sources. Its natural habitat is medieval and early modern English common law, and it largely disappeared as process reform consolidated and simplified writs of summons. Researchers using Law Mind sources to trace procedural history will find this term useful primarily as a marker of period and jurisdiction — its appearance in a document dates that document to a particular era of English legal practice.
There are no meaningful jurisdictional variations to track in American law; the writ was never transplanted into colonial or federal practice in identifiable form.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary are in close agreement, with the second edition adding the writ's full Latin operative language and the structural explanation that the name derived directly from those words. Neither edition provides a date of obsolescence or cites a specific source for the writ's use. The second edition's quotation of the writ's language — *pone per vadium et salvos plegios* — is the more useful entry for researchers, as it allows identification of the writ in original Latin documents.
Neither edition situates the writ within the broader procedural sequence of early English process, nor do they distinguish it from related writs of appearance. Historical treatises on English common law procedure, including Blackstone's *Commentaries* and Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium*, provide richer context for researchers who need to understand where pone per vadium sat within the full architecture of pre-reform process.
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