Definition
A procedural act in English bankruptcy practice by which a petitioning creditor formally initiated bankruptcy proceedings against a debtor. The creditor accomplished this by making an affidavit of the debt owed and delivering a bond — pledging to pursue the proceedings with effect — to the bankrupt office. Upon receipt of these documents, a clerk recorded the matter in a book known as the "docket-book," and at that moment the creditor was said to have "struck a docket." This act was the threshold step: nothing further in the bankruptcy proceeding could advance until the docket had been struck.
Common Confusion
The word "striking" here does not mean removing, canceling, or crossing out — meanings it carries in nearly every other legal context (striking a juror, striking pleadings, striking testimony from the record). Nor does "docket" refer here to a court's calendar of pending cases, which is its dominant modern legal meaning. The phrase is a term of art from English bankruptcy administration, and each word in it carries a specialized, now-archaic sense. Researchers encountering this phrase in historical materials should resist importing either modern meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially extinct in live legal practice. It belongs entirely to a particular era of English bankruptcy administration and will appear only in historical materials — primarily treatises, practice manuals, and reported cases from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the procedural landscape it describes no longer exists. The English bankruptcy system underwent fundamental statutory reform, most significantly through the Bankruptcy Act 1869 and successor legislation, which dismantled the older administrative machinery — including the docket-book apparatus — that gave this term its meaning. Any historical source citing "striking a docket" is describing pre-reform English procedure.
Second, the term has no American counterpart. Early American bankruptcy law borrowed heavily from English models, but the docket-striking mechanism was not transplanted. Researchers working in early American federal bankruptcy materials (under the Bankruptcy Acts of 1800 or 1841) will not encounter this phrase as an operative term.
Third, the phrase can mislead modern researchers who search corpus materials for "docket" or "striking" independently. Neither word alone signals this concept, and the compound phrase requires recognition as a fixed term of art. A full-text search for "docket" in historical English bankruptcy sources will retrieve this phrase, but only researchers who know what they are looking at will understand its procedural significance.
Fourth, the bond element — the creditor's pledge to follow proceedings with effect — is a detail that connects this practice to the broader English legal tradition of requiring undertakings before setting formal machinery in motion. Researchers tracing the history of creditor obligations in bankruptcy initiation will find this term a useful entry point into that comparative history.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four shelf sources are in close agreement on substance, which is itself informative: this was a settled, defined term without significant interpretive dispute. Black's (1st ed.), Burrill, and Bouvier all anchor the definition in the same procedural moment — affidavit plus bond delivered to the bankrupt office, entry made in the docket-book. Black's 2nd edition appears incomplete in the available extract but follows the same pattern.
The sources diverge slightly in emphasis. Burrill and Black's (1st ed.) both quote the docket-book passage nearly verbatim and cite Eden's Bankrupt Law at pages 51–52, suggesting a shared lineage. Bouvier is more compressed, citing Deacon's Bankruptcy (1 Deac. Bank. 106) as authority rather than Eden, and characterizing the act simply as "entering the creditor's affidavit and bond in bankruptcy." Bouvier's brevity reflects his general editorial economy rather than any substantive disagreement.
Stephens' Commentaries (2 Steph. Comm. 199), cited by both Black's and Burrill, provides the clearest doctrinal grounding and remains the most useful secondary source for understanding the procedural context. Eden's Bankrupt Law is the primary practitioner-level authority cited for the mechanics.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the downstream consequence of failing to strike a docket — whether defective affidavits or bonds could void subsequent proceedings, and what procedural remedies existed. Researchers needing that granular procedural detail must go to the primary treatises rather than the dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively English in origin and application. It describes a mechanism of English bankruptcy administration that never took root in American law. Researchers encountering it in any source should treat it as a marker of English historical materials.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia: Case Management and Docket Control in Complex Litigation (civpro_76) — for background on the modern docket concept and its divergence from this historical usage.