Definition
A traverse of an office is a common law procedural remedy by which a person whose lands or rights have been seized by the Crown following an inquisition of office contests the findings of that inquisition. It is, in essence, a formal denial of the facts found by the inquest jury, by which the subject claims that the Crown's title to the property — as declared by the office — is unfounded.
When the Crown sought to assert title to land or property (typically by reason of escheat, forfeiture, attainder, or wardship), it proceeded by a writ directing an inquisition of office: a jury-based inquiry that found whether the Crown's claimed interest existed. The findings of that inquest jury were called an "office found." The traverse of an office was the mechanism by which the party aggrieved — typically the person in possession of the land — could challenge those findings by putting the Crown's alleged title in issue before a court. A successful traverse would defeat the office found and protect the subject's possession.
The traverse was not merely a pleading device; it was the primary legal avenue for resisting Crown seizure of property without submitting to the Crown's claim. It stood as a significant common law protection of property rights against the administrative and prerogative machinery of the Crown.
Common Confusion
The traverse of an office should not be confused with the general pleading doctrine of traverse, which is simply the denial of a material allegation in a pleading. While both share the same etymological root — to traverse means to deny or contradict — the traverse of an office is a specific, historically bounded remedy operating in the context of Crown prerogative and inquisitions of office. A researcher encountering "traverse" in general common law pleading texts is looking at a different institution entirely.
Similarly, an "office found" is not an office in the modern administrative sense. It refers to the formal finding of an inquest jury acting under Crown authority, and "traversing" it means denying the truth of that finding, not contesting a government agency's decision.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the pre-modern English common law of Crown prerogative, property, and procedure. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in:
— Historical treatises and abridgments dealing with Crown land rights, escheat, forfeiture, and wardship (Coke, Fitzherbert, Rolle's Abridgment, Viner's Abridgment).
— Colonial American legal materials, where English prerogative forms were sometimes adapted or explicitly rejected, particularly in contexts involving land grants, royal charters, and forfeiture proceedings.
— Early American case law and treatises from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where writers catalogued or commented on which English forms had survived transplantation to the new republic.
The principal trap for researchers: the term virtually disappears from practical American legal usage after the abolition or transformation of the procedural forms that gave rise to it. Modern forfeiture and escheat proceedings operate under statutory frameworks that replaced the old inquisition-of-office machinery. Finding a reference to "traverse of an office" in an American source after roughly the mid-nineteenth century is unusual and may signal either a historical discussion, a jurisdiction with unusually conservative pleading practice, or a writer drawing on English authority uncritically.
A second trap: the historical source material provided for this entry (Rapalje & Lawrence) contains an entry fragment dealing with high treason, not traverse of an office specifically. This reflects a broader pattern in historical legal dictionaries, where entries are grouped, cross-referenced, or excerpted in ways that can mislead corpus searchers. Researchers using the Rapalje & Lawrence dictionary should be alert to entry boundaries and pagination artifacts that may cause unrelated doctrines to appear in proximity.
Historical Dictionary Support
The available Rapalje & Lawrence source material for this entry is fragmentary and pertains to high treason rather than traverse of an office directly, suggesting either a digitization artifact or a cross-reference structure in the original that is not recoverable from the excerpt alone. No quotation from that source can be responsibly offered for this entry.
More reliable historical treatment of traverse of an office is found in Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, on private wrongs and Crown proceedings) and in the institutional writers generally. Blackstone explains the inquisition of office as the Crown's method of finding its title and notes that the subject's remedy against an erroneous or unjust finding was to traverse it — that is, to deny the facts found and bring the question before the court. Coke's treatment in the Institutes provides the foundational common law analysis. Later abridgments, including Comyns' Digest and Viner's Abridgment under the titles "Office" and "Traverse," collect the relevant case law.
What the historical dictionaries frequently omit: the political and constitutional significance of the traverse as a check on Crown prerogative, which was a live concern from the Tudor period through the seventeenth century. The procedural form carried substantive weight that is easy to miss when reading purely doctrinal accounts.
Jurisdictional Note
The traverse of an office is a doctrine of English common law with no surviving direct American equivalent as a distinct procedural form. Some early American states and territories applied analogous concepts in the context of land grant disputes and escheats, but these were typically absorbed into statutory frameworks by the nineteenth century. Researchers working on colonial or early federal land title questions should check whether individual jurisdictions preserved or adapted the form.