Definition
In Scots law, a formal pleading in a series of written exchanges between parties. The triply was the third pleading filed by the defender (or, depending on procedural posture, by the party responding to the duply), corresponding to what Scots lawyers called the triplicatio in Latin pleading terminology. It followed the pursuer's summons, the defender's answer or duplying response, and constituted the next iteration in the alternating exchange of written arguments before the court. The term belongs to the older Scottish pleading system in which each successive response carried a formal name derived from the number of exchanges: reply, duply, triply, and so on.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): At three times the severity or degree.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): In a triple manner.
The ordinary English meaning — "threefold" or "to three times the degree" — has no connection to the legal meaning. In Scots law, "triply" is a technical term of pleading procedure, not an adverb describing quantity or intensity. A researcher encountering "triply" in a Scottish legal record should not read it as a modifier but as a noun identifying a specific stage of written pleadings.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in older Scottish court records, pleading books, and procedural treatises. The numbered-pleading system it belongs to — in which each exchange had a distinct Latin-derived name — was characteristic of Scots civil procedure before procedural reforms simplified and eventually largely replaced that formal structure. Researchers working in pre-reform Scottish legal records should expect to encounter the full sequence: reply, duply, triply, and occasionally quadruply, each marking a distinct stage of the written process.
The primary trap for researchers is misreading the term as the common English adverb. In a manuscript or printed record, "the triply" refers to a document in a court file, not a description of how something was done. Failure to recognize this can cause the researcher to misread procedural history and miss a substantive pleading.
The corpus entry for this term is narrow. It does not appear in English common law sources, Roman-law treatises in their English-language form, or American legal materials in any routine way. Its presence in a document is itself a strong signal of Scottish jurisdiction and an older procedural era.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement: both identify triply as a term of Scots practice corresponding to the Latin triplicatio, and both cite the same source — 3 How. State Tr. 478, 637, 638 — indicating that the historical dictionaries drew from the same primary reference. Neither source elaborates on the substantive content a triply might contain or the procedural rules governing its filing, which reflects the dictionaries' function as terminological guides rather than procedural manuals.
Neither dictionary addresses the decline or abolition of the numbered pleading sequence in Scottish procedure, leaving the researcher without guidance on the historical window in which the term was operative. For procedural context beyond the bare definition, researchers should look to Scottish institutional writers and court of session materials rather than relying on these dictionary entries alone.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusive to Scots law. It has no recognized equivalent in English common law pleading, which used its own terminology (declaration, plea, replication, rejoinder, surrejoinder, etc.), and it does not appear in American procedural law. Encountering the term outside a Scottish legal context would be exceptional and likely indicates borrowing of Scottish terminology or a direct quotation from a Scottish source.