Definition
A Latin procedural term meaning "in what manner" or "how." In historical English legal practice, *qualiter* appeared as a operative word in old writs, directing attention to the manner or mode in which something was done or was required to be done. It functioned as an interrogative or descriptive particle within the formal language of writs rather than as a term designating a substantive legal concept.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *qualiter* will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern writ pleading materials and the Latin-language procedural texts of medieval and early modern English law. Its significance is purely formal and linguistic: the word signals that the writ or pleading is specifying the manner of an act, obligation, or condition rather than its fact or its substance. Misreading *qualiter* as a substantive legal term of art will send a researcher in the wrong direction; it is better understood as part of the grammatical scaffolding of Latin writs.
Because *qualiter* belongs to the technical vocabulary of the writ system, it disappears almost entirely from legal usage after the abolition of the forms of action and the shift to modern pleading in the nineteenth century. Researchers working in Year Books, plea rolls, or texts such as Fleta will encounter it; researchers working in modern materials will not.
The reference in Burrill to Fleta, lib. 2, c. 64, § 19 points to one of the principal secondary sources of thirteenth-century English legal procedure. Fleta, written circa 1290 and drawing heavily on Bracton, is a treatise on the law and administration of the English royal courts. Its use of *qualiter* in this passage is consistent with the term's role in specifying procedural conditions within formal writ language.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. The definition is brief and accurate: "In what manner. A word used in old writs." Burrill cites Fleta as authority. No additional historical dictionaries in the corpus treat *qualiter* as an independent entry, which is itself instructive — the term was recognized as sufficiently technical to warrant noting, but too narrow and archaic to require extended treatment even in nineteenth-century legal lexicography. Nothing in the historical record suggests the term carried contested or variable meaning; it was a fixed Latin particle with a fixed grammatical function.