Definition
A writ issued to restore a clerk — that is, a member of the clergy — to his lands, goods, and chattels that had been seized following an accusation of felony, once he had successfully undergone purgation before his ordinary and thereby cleared himself of the charge. The writ operated as the formal instrument of restoration following the ecclesiastical proceeding that determined the clerk's innocence. It belongs to the family of writs associated with benefit of clergy and the parallel jurisdictional system under which ordained clergymen accused of serious crimes were delivered from secular courts to ecclesiastical authority for trial and judgment.
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Common Confusion
REHABENDIS POST PURGATION is easily confused with other restitution writs in the benefit-of-clergy framework, and should be distinguished from the process by which a clerk was initially claimed by his ordinary and delivered from secular custody. That preliminary transfer was a distinct procedural step. Rehabendis post purgation applies only at the back end of the process — after purgation had been completed successfully — and its function was specifically the return of property, not the return of the person. Researchers should also be careful not to conflate purgation with acquittal in the modern sense: canonical purgation was a formal proceeding in which the accused clerk swore to his innocence and was supported by oath-helpers (compurgators), not a fact-finding process in the adversarial sense.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal materials and will surface principally in sources treating the old common law writ system, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and benefit of clergy. Researchers working in colonial American legal history or early English legal procedure should be aware that the underlying doctrine — benefit of clergy — underwent dramatic statutory modification in England beginning in the fourteenth century and was progressively curtailed and eventually abolished. The writ of rehabendis post purgation represents a procedural endpoint that only made sense within a functioning system of ecclesiastical purgation, and as that system atrophied, this writ would have become a dead letter long before its formal abolition.
The term is rare enough that it will not appear in most legal dictionaries, and researchers encountering it in manuscript sources, plea rolls, or register entries should be alert to the Latin structure: rehabendis is a gerundive of rehabere (to have back again), and post purgation signals the temporal condition — after purgation. The writ's authority traces to the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Writs), which Rapalje & Lawrence cite directly and which is the primary source for the writ's original form.
For corpus researchers, this term clusters with benefit of clergy, purgation, ordinary, and the broader ecclesiastical-secular jurisdictional boundary materials. It will not appear in American case law with any frequency, as the doctrine had largely ceased to function as a practical matter by the time American legal institutions were established, and benefit of clergy in the American colonies was a simplified and secularized remnant of the English original.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the sole historical dictionary entry located for this term, and their account is brief but accurate. They describe the writ as issuing for "a clerk to recover his lands, goods and chattels, formerly seised, after he had cleared himself of the felony of which he was accused, and delivered to his ordinary to be purged," citing the Registrum Originale. This is consistent with what is known of benefit-of-clergy procedure from broader historical legal scholarship. No other major historical law dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Bouvier, Black, or Jacob — appear to carry a dedicated entry for this specific writ, which reflects its narrow procedural function and early obsolescence. The absence from American-focused dictionaries is unsurprising given that canonical purgation had no meaningful American legal life.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ is a product of English ecclesiastical and common law procedure and has no American counterpart. It is relevant only in the context of English legal history, pre-Reformation ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or historical research into colonial-era legal transplants from English sources. American researchers will encounter it only in historical texts.
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