Definition
In old pleading, triplicaunt (also triplication) refers to the act of rejoining — a defendant's answer to the plaintiff's replication. The term derives from Law French pleading practice and denotes the third substantive exchange in the formal sequence of common law pleading, following the declaration, the plea, and the replication. Where the plaintiff's replication responded to the defendant's plea, the triplicaunt was the defendant's opportunity to answer that replication in turn.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic Law French pleading term with no modern procedural equivalent. Researchers encountering it will almost exclusively do so in pre-modern English legal records, Year Books, or treatises on common law pleading. The term belongs to the elaborate formal pleading sequence that characterized English practice before the reforms of the nineteenth century — reforms that eventually displaced the entire vocabulary of declaration, plea, replication, rejoinder, surrejoinder, rebutter, and surrebutter in favor of simplified modern pleadings.
The principal trap for researchers is terminological layering: what Burrill calls triplicaunt corresponds functionally to rejoinder in the more commonly encountered English-language pleading vocabulary. A researcher working across sources may find the same procedural step described as a triplicaunt in Law French sources and as a rejoinder in English-language sources, without any signal that the terms refer to the same thing. Failure to recognize this equivalence can cause a researcher to misread a pleading sequence or misidentify which party is speaking at a given stage of the record.
The underlying source cited by Burrill — Britton (c. 27) — is a late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise, one of the authoritative early compilations of English law. Researchers consulting Britton directly will find the term in its original Law French context. Burrill's gloss is reliable but thin, and researchers needing fuller treatment of the pleading sequence should look to later common law pleading treatises.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is brief: it identifies the term as Law French, glosses it as "rejoining," and supplies a single citation to Britton. The entry is accurate as far as it goes. Burrill correctly identifies triplicaunt as the defendant's answer at the triplication stage and correctly links it to the rejoinder function in common law pleading.
What Burrill does not supply — and what no single-entry treatment can fully provide — is the broader pleading sequence context that makes the term intelligible. The formal pleading exchange in common law practice could theoretically extend through many alternating rounds: replication, rejoinder (triplicaunt), surrejoinder, rebutter, surrebutter, and beyond. In practice, cases rarely proceeded past rejoinder. The term triplicaunt reflects the counting logic of this sequence: the triplication is literally the third plea (tri-), the defendant's response at the third formal exchange. That structural logic is implicit in the term but goes unremarked in Burrill.
No entry appears in the Law Mind corpus from Black's, Bouvier's, or other major dictionaries, which reflects the term's essentially obsolete status by the time those works were compiled in the nineteenth century. The absence is itself informative: by the mid-1800s, Law French pleading vocabulary had largely been displaced, and terms like triplicaunt were treated as historical curiosities rather than working legal concepts.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English common law pleading tradition and appears in English and early American legal sources predating nineteenth-century procedural reform. It has no recognized place in modern American, English, or Commonwealth pleading practice.