Definition
A Latin pleading phrase meaning "together with." Simul cum appears in two distinct procedural contexts in historical common law practice:
1. In indictments and declarations in trespass or other tort actions, where multiple persons acted jointly but not all are identifiable, the named defendants are alleged to have committed the act "simul cum aliis ignotis" — together with other persons unknown. The phrase preserved the right to proceed against named parties without requiring the pleader to identify every participant.
2. In process, a capias simul cum is a writ of capias directed to the sheriff ordering the arrest of a named defendant to answer together with other defendants already named in the action. It functioned as a coordinating mechanism when defendants were to be brought before the court jointly but could not all be served by a single writ.
Common Confusion
The phrase is sometimes loosely read as mere Latin filler, but it carried procedural weight in both pleading and process. In indictments, the simul cum clause was not surplusage — it acknowledged co-participation while excusing the pleader from naming unknown actors. In capias practice, simul cum identified the specific procedural posture of the writ: the arrestee was not a sole defendant but one of several. Conflating the two uses, or treating either as merely stylistic, risks misreading the procedural intent of historical documents.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical indictments, trespass declarations, or common law process records will encounter simul cum as a term of art embedded in formulaic pleading language. Several traps exist:
First, the phrase appears in both criminal and civil records, but its function differs. In a criminal indictment, simul cum aliis ignotis signals that the grand jury found sufficient evidence against the named defendant while acknowledging unknown co-participants — relevant to questions of conspiracy, accessorial liability, or the scope of the charged offense. In a civil trespass declaration, it performs the same structural role but within the context of joint tortfeasor liability.
Second, in process records — sheriff's returns, writs books, court rolls — a capias simul cum signals a multi-defendant action and indicates that other defendants were already in process or had already appeared. A researcher tracing the procedural history of a case must recognize this posture to correctly reconstruct the sequence of pleadings and appearances.
Third, because the phrase is Latin and formulaic, it is frequently abbreviated or omitted in transcriptions and abstracts of historical records. Researchers relying on calendared or regested sources rather than original documents may miss the simul cum clause entirely, losing the signal that unknown co-actors were alleged or that co-defendants were named elsewhere in the action.
Fourth, the corpus connections are primarily to pleading practice, writ practice, and criminal procedure in the pre-codification common law tradition. Researchers following these threads will want to cross-reference entries on capias, joint tortfeasors, indictment form, and trespass pleading.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) treats simul cum primarily through the lens of indictments and tort declarations, defining it as "together with" and illustrating its use in the "persons unknown" formula. The second edition is slightly more precise, explicitly naming the indictment context and quoting the operative phrase. Neither edition addresses the capias simul cum use in process.
Burrill's is the more complete source for this term. Burrill identifies both the process use (capias simul cum, with reference to Burrows' Practice) and the pleading use (indictments and trespass declarations, citing Lilly's Abridgment), and points additionally to Fleta — the late thirteenth-century English legal treatise — for deeper historical grounding. The Fleta citations (lib. 5, c. 4, § 2 and lib. 6, c. 49, § 4) suggest the phrase's procedural roots in medieval English practice, though researchers should engage Fleta directly for context rather than relying on Burrill's bare citations. No modern legal dictionary of significance carries this term, reflecting its confinement to historical pleading and process practice that was largely superseded by code pleading reforms in the nineteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
Simul cum is a term of English common law pleading and process. Its practical relevance is greatest in research involving English and early American (pre-code) court records. Jurisdictions that adopted the Field Code or similar pleading reforms in the mid-to-late nineteenth century effectively abolished the formal pleading structures in which simul cum operated.