Definition
A Latin term meaning "it is to be known" or "it should be known." In English legal practice, *sciendum* refers to a specific clause inserted into a court record to formally note that a writ was delivered by the court to an officer — typically a deputy sheriff — for execution in due form of law. The clause functioned as an official notation within the record, documenting the court's act of issuing and delivering process to the appropriate ministerial officer.
The term is the gerundive of the Latin verb *scire* (to know), and its use in the record was essentially declaratory: it announced, for the record, what had transpired in open court regarding process.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *sciendum* clauses will find them almost exclusively in older English court records and early American records that followed English practice closely. The term belongs to a class of formal Latin record-keeping conventions that fell out of use as courts modernized their procedures and abandoned Law Latin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
When reading historical plea rolls, court records, or treatises describing record structure, the *sciendum* clause marks a specific procedural moment — the delivery of a writ — and distinguishes that act from the writ's return or execution. Researchers should not confuse the presence of the clause with evidence that the writ was actually served; it documents delivery to the officer, not completion of service.
Because the clause appears as an internal record notation rather than as a standalone document, it will not appear as a freestanding entry in most filing indexes. Researchers working with original records should look for it embedded within the body of the roll or record entry, often following the recitation of court proceedings and preceding the return date.
The term has essentially no living procedural significance in modern American or English practice. Its research value is almost entirely historical and documentary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive historical dictionary treatment of this term. Black's defines *sciendum* by reference to its English legal context, quoting the operative language of the clause itself — that the justice in court, in the same term, "delivered a writ thereupon to the deputy-sheriff of the county aforesaid, to be executed in due form of law" — and citing Lee's Dictionary under the heading "Record."
The definition is narrow and accurate. It correctly situates *sciendum* as a record clause rather than a substantive legal doctrine, and the citation to Lee's Dictionary suggests the term was recognized as a term of art in English record-keeping practice well before Black's compilation. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard reference corpus appear to have treated this term at length, which itself signals how specialized and technical its usage was — a term of the records office, not of the courtroom or the treatise writer.
The brevity of the historical dictionary treatment reflects the term's function: it was a formulaic notation, part of the machinery of record construction, and would have been understood by clerks and practitioners of the period without requiring extended explanation.