Definition
Symbolzography is the art or science of correctly drafting and preparing written legal instruments. The term encompasses both the technical skill and the practical knowledge required to produce legally effective documents — including contracts, agreements, wills, and instruments arising within judicial proceedings.
The term admits two branches:
1. Judicial symbolzography: The drafting of written instruments connected to matters already in controversy before a court — pleadings, writs, and similar documents generated within the machinery of litigation.
2. Extrajudicial symbolzography: The drafting of instruments that concern matters not yet in litigation — principally contracts, agreements, and testamentary instruments such as wills. This is the branch most closely associated with the work of scriveners and notaries in historical practice.
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Common Confusion
Symbolzography is sometimes loosely treated as synonymous with conveyancing or scrivening, but the terms are not identical. Conveyancing refers specifically to the transfer of property interests through written instruments. Scrivening refers to the occupation of drafting documents professionally. Symbolzography is the broader art underlying both — the theoretical and practical discipline of instrument-drafting as a whole, not limited to any single category of document or professional role.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in older English legal materials. Its use in American sources is rare and largely confined to treatises and dictionaries working in the tradition of early modern English legal scholarship. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a period marker: its presence signals a document or author working within a pre-19th-century English legal framework, or a later author consciously drawing on that tradition.
The primary practical trap is terminological: a researcher scanning historical materials for discussion of contract drafting, will preparation, or document formalities may miss relevant material indexed or discussed under this term rather than under the more familiar headings of conveyancing, pleading, or testamentary practice.
The division into judicial and extrajudicial branches is analytically useful for navigating historical treatise literature. Early modern English works on legal drafting often organized their content along exactly this axis. When a historical source discusses extrajudicial instruments, it is generally addressing private ordering — the documents by which parties structured obligations, transferred interests, and expressed testamentary intent outside the courts. Judicial instruments connect to the law of pleading and procedure. Understanding which branch a historical source addresses prevents misreading its scope.
The term also surfaces in discussions of the notarial and scrivening professions, where the competent practice of symbolzography was treated as the core professional qualification. Researchers working on the history of legal professions, the regulation of document drafting, or the development of formality requirements in contracts and wills will find the concept relevant even where the specific term is absent from later sources.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) preserves the term with attribution to Wharton — a reference to John Jane Smith Wharton's Law Lexicon, itself a foundational English legal dictionary. Black's definition tracks the traditional description closely: the art of rightly forming written instruments, divided into judicial and extrajudicial branches.
The Wharton attribution is significant. It places the term within a continuous line of English legal lexicography running from the early modern period through the 19th century. The term itself appears in Richard Robinson's 1575 work of that name — one of the earliest practical guides to legal drafting in the English tradition — and the definition preserved in Black's reflects that lineage.
What Black's does not address, and what no American legal dictionary entry is likely to address, is the term's functional obsolescence. By the time Black's was compiled, symbolzography had ceased to be a working term of art in American legal practice. Its appearance in the dictionary is essentially archival — preserving a concept that had been absorbed into the more specific vocabularies of conveyancing, pleading, and testamentary practice rather than maintained as a unified discipline under its own heading.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is of English origin and has no meaningful independent history in American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions. Its relevance in American legal research is limited to sources drawing directly on English legal lexicography or early modern English treatise tradition.
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