Definition
A Latin term meaning "[he] hath signified," used in two related but distinct senses in English ecclesiastical and chancery practice:
1. The Bishop's Certificate. In its primary standalone use, significavit refers to the certificate issued by a bishop (or other ordinary) to the Court of Chancery, formally signifying that a named individual had remained excommunicate for a period of forty days without submitting to the authority of the church. This certificate was the prerequisite instrument for obtaining the writ de excommunicato capiendo (later styled the writ de contumace capiendo), which authorized the arrest and imprisonment of the excommunicated person.
2. The Writ Itself. By extension, significavit came to denote the writ that issued from Chancery on the strength of that certificate — the instrument commanding the arrest of the contumacious party. Burrill notes that the term specifically describes the operative clause within that writ which recites that a competent ecclesiastical judge "hath signified" to the Crown that the party is manifestly contumacious. The writ and the clause naming it were so closely associated that the term migrated from one to the other in common legal usage. Where the phrase "writ of significavit" is used, it is synonymous with the writ de excommunicato capiendo.
Both senses are now obsolete. The ecclesiastical machinery to which this term belongs has not been operative in English law for well over a century.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A writ issuing out of chancery, upon certificate given by the ordinary, of a man's standing excommunicate by the space of forty days, for the laying him up in prison till he submit himself to the authority of the church."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Formerly, a writ issuing out of chancery, upon certificate given by the ordinary, of a man's standing excommunicate by the space of forty days, for the laying him up in prison till he submit himself to the authority of the church."
Both the popular and legal traditions collapse what are technically two distinct instruments — the bishop's certificate and the writ it produced — into a single definition. The legal distinction matters to researchers because the term significavit alone refers to the initiating certificate, while "writ of significavit" or the writ de excommunicato capiendo describes the coercive order that followed from it.
Common Confusion
The terms significavit, de excommunicato capiendo, and de contumace capiendo are frequently used interchangeably in historical sources, which obscures a procedural sequence. The significavit was the bishop's notification; de excommunicato capiendo was the writ that issued in response; de contumace capiendo was the later statutory reformulation of the same writ. Burrill's entry is careful to treat the significavit as a clause and a procedural step rather than the writ itself. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century chancery records must be alert to the fact that a source using "significavit" may mean the certificate, the clause, or the writ depending on context and period.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in historical English ecclesiastical and chancery sources. Several navigational points apply:
Period sensitivity is critical. The significavit belongs to a procedural system that was already archaic by the Victorian era. Sources describing it as current practice will generally predate the nineteenth-century reforms that dismantled the practical enforcement arm of ecclesiastical courts in England. Black's (1st Ed.) flags the term as obsolete; researchers should treat any source that uses it in a live procedural context as pre-reform.
The certificate/writ ambiguity recurs across sources. Legal dictionaries themselves disagree on emphasis: Black's leads with the bishop's certificate meaning and notes equivalence to the writ; Burrill's frames the term primarily around the writ's contumacy clause. Neither is wrong, but neither tells the complete story alone. Researchers relying on a single dictionary entry may miss that the same word had functional meanings at two stages of the same procedure.
Connections to ecclesiastical discipline and canon law enforcement. The significavit sits at the intersection of ecclesiastical authority and secular enforcement — the point at which the church invoked Crown power to compel submission. Understanding its function requires familiarity with the broader system of ecclesiastical courts, the concept of contumacy, and the limits of church enforcement power, all of which are relevant background for researching matrimonial, testamentary, and defamation matters in pre-reform English courts.
American irrelevance. This term has no meaningful presence in American legal practice or sources. Researchers encountering it in American contexts will be reading English treatises or borrowing English terminology for comparative purposes only.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three shelf sources converge on the core meaning but approach it from different angles. Black's (1st Ed.) is the most useful for disambiguation, explicitly distinguishing the standalone term (the bishop's certificate) from the phrase "writ of significavit" (equivalent to de excommunicato capiendo). It correctly marks the term obsolete. Burrill's takes a more granular procedural view, defining the term by its operative clause within the writ — "hath signified" — and treating the writ as the primary referent. Black's (2nd Ed.) provides only a fragment in the available source text and adds little beyond confirming the ecclesiastical law context.
Webster's 1913, though a general dictionary, is substantively accurate and agrees with the legal sources on the forty-day excommunication threshold and the imprisonment mechanism. The general and legal definitions are unusually close for this term, which reflects how thoroughly the term had passed from active legal use into historical description by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
What the historical sources collectively underemphasize is the procedural relationship between the certificate and the writ — treating what was a two-step enforcement sequence as a single instrument. Researchers need Holthouse (cited by Burrill) and Shelford's Marriage and Divorce for fuller procedural context, as the dictionary entries alone do not reconstruct the sequence.
Jurisdictional Note
Significavit is a term of English ecclesiastical and chancery law with no operative equivalent in American jurisdiction. It may appear in English legal history scholarship, colonial American sources borrowing English ecclesiastical procedure, or Anglican church governance materials, but carries no legal force in any current jurisdiction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Ecclesiastical Courts — for the institutional framework in which the significavit operated; Excommunication — for the church discipline that triggered the certificate procedure; Writs — for the broader taxonomy of original writs within which de excommunicato capiendo and its variants appear.