Definition
A writ in old English practice by which a civil cause pending in a court baron was removed and transferred into the county court. The tolt was a precept directed by the sheriff to his bailiff, commanding the bailiff to attend the lord's court, take away the pending plaint, and bring it before the county court instead.
The writ operated as a mechanism of jurisdictional transfer, not a challenge to the merits. Its effect was purely procedural: extracting the matter from the more limited, seignorial forum of the court baron and placing it within the wider jurisdiction of the county court.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative form of "tölt," an Icelandic horse gait.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A writ by which a cause pending in a court baron was removed into a country court."
Webster's 1913 here simply records the legal term rather than a common-language meaning. The Wiktionary entry reflects a wholly unrelated term from equestrian usage. There is no meaningful common-language counterpart to the legal term; researchers encountering "tolt" outside a historical legal context should not assume any connection to the writ.
Why It Matters in Research
TOLT is a term of exclusively historical English law and has no living procedural counterpart. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in pre-nineteenth-century common law materials — treatises on the old English court system, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, Blackstone's Commentaries, and records touching the court baron and county court system.
Three navigational points for corpus research:
First, the tolt sits within a cluster of related removal writs — pone, recordari facias loquelam, accedas ad curiam — that operated across overlapping jurisdictional levels of the old English court structure. A researcher following a dispute from a court baron upward through the system will encounter these writs together; understanding tolt requires placing it within that procedural ladder.
Second, the court baron itself was a creature of manorial tenure and was effectively obsolete as a functioning court by the nineteenth century. Materials discussing tolt after roughly 1800 are invariably historical or academic rather than practical.
Third, Latin-form spellings vary. The term appears in sources as tolta (the Latin noun form) and tolt (the anglicized form). Burrill and Bouvier both flag tolta as the Latin root. Corpus searches should account for both forms, as well as the possibility that older manuscript sources use the full Latin phrase beginning with tolta.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree in all material respects: tolt is a writ removing a cause from a court baron to the county court. Burrill provides the most complete treatment, adding the Latin explanatory phrase quia tollit atque eximit causam è curia baronum — "because it takes away and removes the cause from the court of the barons" — drawn from Coke's preface to the Third Reports. This phrase is the root of the writ's name and confirms that the label is descriptive of the writ's function.
Bouvier and Burrill both cite Cowell's Interpreter and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium as primary sources, and Burrill additionally cites Blackstone's Commentaries at 3 Bl. Com. 34 and 195. These remain the key secondary authorities for understanding the writ in its procedural context.
No meaningful divergence exists among the historical dictionaries on substance. The entries are consistent and brief, which itself signals that the term had become antiquarian even at the time of compilation. None of the dictionaries discuss regional variation or limitation, and none suggest any continued practical use. What the historical sources do not address is the procedural interaction between tolt and the subsequent removal writs that could carry a cause still further up the jurisdictional hierarchy — a gap a researcher must fill from Blackstone or Fitzherbert directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Tolt is a term of English law only. It has no counterpart in American law, Scots law, or other common law jurisdictions, reflecting the absence in those systems of the court baron and the manorial tenure structure that made the writ necessary.