Definition
A writ of English constitutional history directing the recall of a parliament. The writ functioned as a formal royal command to summon back, or revoke the dissolution or prorogation of, a parliamentary session. It belongs to the category of prerogative writs through which the Crown exercised executive control over the convening and dispersal of Parliament.
The term is Latin, meaning roughly "for the recalling of Parliament," and belongs to a body of obsolete parliamentary writs that have no functional equivalent in modern constitutional practice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will almost never appear in a substantive legal dispute. Its significance in a Law Mind corpus is navigational and contextual: it surfaces in historical treatments of parliamentary procedure, prerogative writs, and Crown-Parliament relations, not in case law or statutory material.
Researchers working in English constitutional history should understand that this writ reflects an era when the Crown's control over Parliament was operational and enforceable through formal legal instruments. The shift away from such writs — toward conventions, standing orders, and ultimately fixed-term legislation — is a long arc that this term helps anchor at its starting point.
The sole historical citation across all four source dictionaries is 4 Inst. 44, referring to Coke's Fourth Institute. That uniformity signals that no independent legal development occurred around this writ; it was already antiquarian by the time the major dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should treat this as a terminus citation: Coke is likely as far back as any dictionary source will take you, and the writ itself predates even his commentary.
Do not expect this term to link forward into modern parliamentary or constitutional law. It has no living descendant doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's — are in complete agreement: the writ is "ancient," its function is "recalling a parliament," and its authority is Coke's Fourth Institute at page 44. None of the dictionaries elaborates further, which itself is informative. The uniformity suggests that by the time these dictionaries were written, the writ was sufficiently dead that no practitioner commentary had accumulated around it.
Bouvier's entry is the only one that adds anything beyond the standard formulation, and only by juxtaposition: the immediately following entry in Bouvier's covers REVOCATUR, the Latin term for an annulled judgment recalled for error in fact. The proximity is coincidental — REVOCATUR belongs to a different domain of law entirely — but the pairing illustrates how historical dictionaries organized terms alphabetically without implying substantive connection.
None of the dictionaries addresses who could issue the writ, under what procedural conditions, or whether it was ever contested. Coke's Fourth Institute remains the essential primary source for any researcher who needs to go deeper.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is exclusively English in origin and application. It has no counterpart in American, Scottish, or colonial legal traditions, which never adopted the Crown-Parliament constitutional structure that gave rise to it.