Definition
A traverse of office is a common law procedural remedy by which a person challenges the findings of an inquisition or inquiry conducted by an escheator — a royal or crown officer responsible for determining whether property had escheated (reverted) to the sovereign upon the death of a person without heirs or upon attainder. To traverse an office is to contest and disprove the inquisition's findings as defective, false, or incorrectly made, with the goal of defeating the crown's claim to the lands or goods identified in that proceeding.
The term operates at the intersection of two older legal concepts: the writ or finding known as an "office" (an official inquisition or finding by a jury before an escheator), and the procedural act of "traversal" (formal denial and contestation of a factual allegation). A traverse of office was thus the formal legal mechanism by which an aggrieved party — typically an heir, creditor, or other claimant — could contest the crown's assertion of title to property.
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Common Language
This entry omitted — traverse of office is pure legal jargon of the historical common law with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary modern English usage.
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Common Confusion
Two concepts that frequently blur in historical sources:
TRAVERSE OF OFFICE vs. OFFICE FOUND: The "office found" is the inquisition itself — the formal finding by an escheator's jury that property belongs to the crown. The traverse of office is the challenge to that finding. Researchers encountering "office found" in older materials should not conflate it with the remedy that reverses it.
TRAVERSE OF OFFICE vs. WRIT OF ERROR / AUDITA QUERELA: All three can be used to challenge prior proceedings, but they operate differently. A traverse contests the factual basis of the original inquisition directly. A writ of error attacks legal error on the record. Audita querela raises new matter arising after judgment. In historical pleading literature, these distinctions are sometimes elided.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is nearly extinct in modern practice but appears with moderate frequency in historical legal materials spanning roughly the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Researchers working in colonial American property law, English land law, or the law of escheat will encounter it in older treatises, Year Books, and early American case reporters.
Several navigational points matter:
First, the word "office" in this context carries a meaning entirely foreign to modern readers — it refers not to a position of employment but to an official inquisition or finding. Researchers scanning historical indexes or full-text searches must account for this: searches on "office" in older property law contexts may return traverse-of-office materials unexpectedly, or may miss them entirely if the search targets only modern senses of the word.
Second, the mechanism was closely tied to the feudal system of tenure and escheat. As fee simple absolute ownership displaced feudal tenure and as escheat law was reformed and codified in both England and the American states, the traverse of office lost its procedural footing. By the early nineteenth century, most American jurisdictions had abolished or replaced the underlying escheator system, rendering the traverse of office procedurally vestigial. Researchers should not expect to find the term functioning as live doctrine in American sources after roughly 1830–1850, though it may appear in historical recitations.
Third, for researchers tracing the evolution of escheat law in American constitutional and property contexts, the traverse of office represents an important procedural predecessor to modern statutory mechanisms for challenging state claims to property — including unclaimed property proceedings and the due process protections that now attach to them.
Fourth, be alert to spelling and terminology variation in historical sources: "traverse of an office," "traversing the office," and simply "office traversed" all appear in older materials and refer to the same procedure.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary preserves only a single-line definition, citing Tomlins's Law Dictionary: "The proving that an inquisition made of lands or goods by the escheator is defective and untruly made." This entry is accurate but compressed to the point of being navigational dead weight without surrounding context.
Tomlins's Law Dictionary (1820), to which Black's refers, treats the traverse of office within its broader discussion of escheators and office found, and provides more procedural texture — including the rule that a person claiming title adversely to the crown had to traverse the office within a fixed period or lose the right to contest it. That time-bar dimension is entirely absent from Black's entry and is important for researchers reading historical disputes about lapsed claims.
Jacob's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary (earlier editions) both address office found and traversal in more detail than Black's, particularly in the context of the writ of diem clausit extremum (the writ directing an escheator to conduct an inquisition after a tenant-in-chief died). Researchers who find Black's entry insufficient — which is likely — should move directly to those sources and to Blackstone's Commentaries, Book II, chapters on tenure and escheat, where the procedural chain is laid out in readable form.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: none provides adequate guidance on the American colonial and early republic reception of the traverse of office, nor on how individual states abolished or replaced the underlying machinery. For that, researchers must turn to state-specific property law histories.
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Jurisdictional Note
The traverse of office was a procedure of English common law and was received in American colonial practice to the extent that escheator machinery was established. Most American states dismantled escheator offices in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and replaced escheat procedures with statutory regimes. The traverse of office has no surviving procedural life in any U.S. jurisdiction as an operative remedy.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses traverse of office. The closest contextual background can be found in:
- The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia: Local Administrative Agencies and Hearing Officers (admin_89) — for background on quasi-official inquisitorial proceedings and how they are challenged.
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