Definition
A judicial writ in the old common law of distress directing the return of impounded cattle or goods to their owner. The writ issued in favor of a defendant who had successfully defeated a replevin action brought against them — that is, when the plaintiff in replevin failed to establish a right to the distrained property, the court would issue returnum averiorum to compel the property's return to the distraining party. The term is Latin for "return of the cattle" (or more broadly, return of the goods). It operated as the enforcement mechanism for a judgment in favor of the distrainor after the replev in failed.
Common Confusion
Returnum averiorum is closely associated with the writ retorno habendo (also called de retorno habendo), and the historical dictionaries treat the two as near-equivalents. The distinction, to the extent one exists, is functional: retorno habendo is the more commonly cited name for the writ of return in replevin proceedings generally, while returnum averiorum appears as an alternative Latin formulation of the same or a substantially identical writ. Researchers encountering either term in old pleading records or writ registers are dealing with the same procedural remedy. Do not confuse either with replevin itself, which is the plaintiff's action to recover the distrained goods — returnum averiorum runs in the opposite direction, in favor of the party who held the distrained property.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law sources — writ registers, Year Books, early pleading manuals, and treatises on the law of distress and replevin. Researchers working in colonial American or early English court records dealing with livestock disputes, landlord-tenant distress actions, or debt enforcement through distraint should recognize it as part of the replevin procedural sequence rather than a standalone cause of action.
The term is practically extinct in modern practice. Replevin has been substantially reformed or replaced by statutory claim-and-delivery procedures in most jurisdictions, and the old writ nomenclature has fallen away entirely. Any appearance of returnum averiorum in a research source post-nineteenth century is almost certainly a quotation from or citation to an older authority.
One navigational trap: Rapalje & Lawrence's entry conflates this term with a separate note — "A RETURN INTO THIS STATE, (in a statute)" followed by a New York citation — suggesting their entry may have suffered a printing or editorial error that blended two distinct entries. Researchers should not read the New York citation as legal authority for returnum averiorum itself; it appears to be a typographical artifact of the source, not a case applying this writ.
The term's Latin form also means it will sometimes appear untranslated and unexplained in historical records, since clerks and practitioners of the period were expected to know it. Glossaries in early replevin treatises — particularly those following Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium or later abridgments — are the most reliable guides to its procedural context.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: returnum averiorum is a judicial writ similar to the retorno habendo. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier cite Cowell's Interpreter as the authority, reflecting how deeply this term belongs to the antiquarian layer of English legal vocabulary — Cowell's work dates to the early seventeenth century. Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce substantially the same definition.
None of the source dictionaries elaborate on when exactly the writ issued, how it was executed, or how it related procedurally to the judgment in replevin. For that level of detail, researchers must go beyond the dictionary shelf to treatises on distress and replevin — Woodfall on Landlord and Tenant, or earlier works in the Fitzherbert tradition, provide the procedural scaffolding that the dictionaries assume rather than explain. The silence of the dictionaries on procedural mechanics is itself informative: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the writ was sufficiently archaic that only its bare identification was considered necessary.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ is rooted in English common law and was available in American courts during the colonial and early national periods wherever common law replevin procedure was followed. Its practical use in American courts had faded well before the major nineteenth-century procedural reforms, and it has no modern statutory analog under that name.