Definition
A Latin term meaning "to draw back" or "to withdraw." In old English practice, *retrahere* described the act by which a plaintiff withdrew from a proceeding — either from the writ, from the action, or from both. The term carries a technical distinction that was consequential in medieval pleading: withdrawing from the writ (*breve*) was not automatically equivalent to withdrawing from the underlying action. A plaintiff who merely retracted the writ left the action itself potentially alive unless the withdrawal expressly encompassed both.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears in the context of early common law procedure, where the relationship between the writ and the action it initiated was treated as legally distinct. Researchers working with medieval plea rolls, Year Books, or treatises such as Bracton will encounter *retrahere* in the procedural vocabulary governing plaintiff withdrawal. The critical trap: do not read a reference to withdrawal from a writ as equivalent to abandonment of the cause of action. Bracton's formulation — cited in Burrill — makes plain that the two are severable, and that only an express withdrawal from both extinguished the proceeding completely.
The term connects to the broader corpus of Latin procedural vocabulary in English legal history and sits in the same family of concepts as *nolle prosequi*, *nonsuit*, and *discontinuance* — each representing a distinct mode by which a plaintiff might step back from litigation, with different procedural and substantive consequences. Researchers tracing the history of voluntary dismissal and its modern analogues should use *retrahere* as a gateway into Bracton and the plea roll records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where this vocabulary was operative.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving lexicographic treatment. Burrill renders *retrahere* as "to draw back; to withdraw" and preserves the Bracton passage at folio 182b, which is the anchor text for the term's technical meaning. The Bracton quotation is the essential source: *si simpliciter se retrahat à brevi, non tamen se retrahit ab actione, nisi expresse dicat quod se retrahat ab utroque* — "if he merely withdraw himself from the writ, he does not thereby withdraw himself from the action, unless he expressly says that he withdraws himself from both."
No other major historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black, Jacob, Tomlin) carry a developed entry for this term. This is consistent with the term's status as a piece of Latinate medieval pleading vocabulary that had receded from active use well before the nineteenth-century legal dictionary era. The absence from later sources is itself informative: by the time Bouvier and Black were compiled, the procedural framework that gave *retrahere* its technical bite — the sharp distinction between writ and action — had been substantially displaced by reformed pleading systems. Researchers should not expect post-Bracton treatment in standard reference works and should go directly to the primary medieval sources.
Jurisdictional Note
*Retrahere* is a term of old English common law procedure and has no operative meaning in modern American or English practice. Its relevance is confined to historical legal research, particularly work involving pre-Reformation English pleading, Bracton's *De Legibus*, and the Year Books.