Definition
Securitatem is a Latin term of medieval English legal procedure meaning, broadly, "security" — the giving of a formal pledge or surety as required by a court or legal process. It appears most often in writs, plea roll entries, and procedural records as part of fixed Latin formulae directing a party to find or provide security, whether for appearance, good behavior, keeping the peace, or the satisfaction of a judgment.
The term is best understood not as a standalone substantive concept but as a procedural signal embedded in longer Latin commands. Common constructions include:
1. Securitatem invenire — to find security; to produce a surety or pledge sufficient to satisfy a court's requirement before proceeding.
2. Securitatem pacis — security of the peace; a pledge, typically obtained by writ, that a named person would keep the peace toward the complainant. The precursor to the modern recognizance to keep the peace.
3. Securitatem de bono gestu — security for good behavior; a broader pledge than security of the peace, requiring assurance of general lawful conduct.
The term thus functions as a genus covering several species of formal pledge, each defined by the purpose for which security was demanded.
Common Confusion
Securitatem is sometimes conflated with the substantive law of suretyship or bail in modern research, but the term is procedural, not substantive. It describes the act or requirement of pledging security within a writ or court record, not the underlying legal relationship between principal and surety. Researchers encountering securitatem in plea rolls or year books should resist reading modern bail or bond doctrine backward into the term. Similarly, securitatem pacis is not synonymous with a modern restraining order or injunction; it operated through the surety mechanism, not through direct prohibition.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Securitatem pacis — security of the peace. Obtained by writ directed to the sheriff requiring a named person to find sureties for keeping the peace toward a named complainant. Available before justices of the peace and by writ out of Chancery.
Securitatem de bono gestu — security for good behavior. Broader in scope than securitatem pacis; required of persons suspected of a general tendency toward disorder or criminal conduct rather than a specific threatened breach of the peace.
Securitatem invenire — the generic form appearing in diverse writs and process, requiring the production of pledges or sureties as a condition of proceeding, obtaining a writ, or avoiding imprisonment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval and early modern English legal records — particularly plea rolls, coroner's rolls, sessions records, and Year Books — will encounter securitatem as boilerplate Latin embedded in standardized writ language. Because the term appears in formulaic constructions rather than in discursive legal text, it is easy to read past it without recognizing its procedural significance.
The critical navigational point is that the specific construction matters enormously. Securitatem pacis and securitatem de bono gestu are distinct instruments with distinct histories and distinct procedural triggers. Conflating them in a search or in analysis will produce errors in tracing the development of the peace-keeping jurisdiction of justices of the peace, which is one of the most important threads in English local legal history.
In the Law Mind corpus, securitatem will surface most frequently in: (1) materials on the jurisdiction of justices of the peace; (2) treatises and manuals on the forms of writs; (3) discussions of suretyship and recognizance; and (4) historical treatments of the distinction between civil and criminal process in English practice. The term largely disappears from legal writing after the shift to English pleading in the nineteenth century, so sources from that point forward will use "security," "surety," "recognizance," or "bond" without Latin antecedent.
A further research trap: securitatem in its generic sense (security, pledge) appears in non-English civil law and canon law sources as well. Context — particularly the surrounding writ formula and the court of origin — is necessary to determine whether a particular use reflects English common law procedure or a continental or ecclesiastical borrowing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a dedicated entry for securitatem as an independent term. The source material preserved in the Law Mind corpus places the term in the context of a passage describing civil litigation as a form of warfare — plaintiffs armed with actions and girded with swords, defendants fortified with pleas and protected as with shields (citing Hobart 20). This framing, drawn from the broader tradition of Latin procedural maxims, situates securitatem within the adversarial structure of English common law pleading: security is one of the defensive instruments available to a party resisting process or judgment.
What historical dictionaries of law generally do well here is preserve the writ formulae in which securitatem appears, giving researchers the exact Latin constructions needed to identify and interpret records. What they tend to underserve is the distinction between the peace and good-behavior variants and the evolution of the justice of the peace's security jurisdiction from the fourteenth century forward. For that development, treatise literature — particularly the manuals for justices of the peace from Lambarde onward — is more instructive than the dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Securitatem and its cognate constructions are features of English common law procedure and the records generated by English courts, justices of the peace, and royal writs. Scottish, Irish, and colonial American records may reflect analogous security requirements but will not necessarily use identical Latin formulae. Researchers working in jurisdictions that received English common law should verify local procedural history before assuming direct equivalence.