Definition
In old common law pleading, the defendant's formal written response to the plaintiff's replication. Triplicacion (also spelled triplicacion or triplication) occupied the third stage of the responsive pleading sequence: after the plaintiff filed a declaration, the defendant answered; the plaintiff replied (replication); and the defendant then countered with the triplicacion. It is the equivalent of what later procedural systems call a rejoinder.
The term belongs to the archaic vocabulary of formal common law pleading, which required parties to exchange successive written responses until a single issue of law or fact was joined. Each round of pleading had a distinct name, and triplicacion marks the defendant's position in that third exchange.
Common Confusion
Triplicacion is easily confused with rejoinder, surrejoinder, rebutter, and surrebutter — the terms that follow it in the pleading chain. The sequence runs: declaration → plea → replication → rejoinder (triplicacion) → surrejoinder → rebutter → surrebutter. Researchers encountering any of these terms in historical records should map the full exchange to understand where each party stood. Triplicacion and rejoinder are functionally synonymous; the difference is linguistic register, with triplicacion drawn from Law French and rejoinder the more common Anglo-French and later English form.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical legal procedure with no surviving operational meaning in modern American or English practice. Code pleading reforms of the mid-nineteenth century (Field Code, 1848, and its successors) abolished the elaborate common law pleading sequence and collapsed it into complaint, answer, and reply. Federal and most state rules of civil procedure completed the transformation. Researchers will encounter triplicacion only in pre-reform court records, Year Books, early treatises, and historical legal dictionaries.
Several traps exist for corpus researchers:
First, spelling is inconsistent across historical sources. Law French terms were transcribed phonetically by English clerks, producing variants including triplication, triplicacion, and triplicatio (the Latin form). Search strategies in historical corpora should account for all variants.
Second, the term may appear in secondary sources describing old pleading systems without being a live procedural label at the time of writing. A nineteenth-century treatise explaining common law pleading history uses triplicacion descriptively, not prescriptively.
Third, jurisdictional transplant matters. Colonial American courts inherited English common law pleading forms, so the term appears in early American records, particularly in equity and common law courts before local procedural codes were enacted. The timing of code pleading adoption varied by state, meaning triplicacion may persist in some state records into the 1860s or later.
Finally, the citation to Britton (Britt. c. 77) is a pointer to a significant thirteenth-century English law text attributed to John le Breton, written circa 1290. Researchers using this citation should consult editions of Britton carefully, as chapter numbering varies across manuscripts and printed editions.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill — are in complete agreement: triplicacion is defined as a rejoinder in pleading, specifically the defendant's answer to the plaintiff's replication, with the shared citation to Britton c. 77. The uniformity across sources reflects a term that was well-settled in meaning but already archaic by the time these dictionaries were compiled. None of the three sources offers extended analysis or distinguishes the term from related pleading stages, which limits their utility for researchers needing to reconstruct the full pleading sequence. Black's second edition adds no new content beyond the first. Burrill, which often provides greater depth on historical terms, is equally spare here, suggesting the term was treated as self-explanatory within a learned readership already familiar with common law pleading structure. What the historical dictionaries do not address: the Latin cognate triplicatio, the equity pleading parallel, or the procedural moment at which triplicacion was displaced by the rejoinder terminology in ordinary legal usage.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pleading (Common Law); History of Civil Procedure.