Definition
Latin: "comes and says." A formal phrase appearing in old common law pleading records to introduce the words or allegations of a party appearing before the court. When a defendant or other party entered a plea or made a statement in court, the record would note that the party "venit et dicit" — came and said — followed by the substance of what was offered. The phrase functioned as a standard recital confirming the party's presence and participation in the proceeding, distinguishing an appearance and active response from a default or non-appearance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early common law pleading records, Year Books, or English plea rolls will encounter this phrase as a routine formula rather than a term of substantive legal significance. Its importance is structural: it signals the transition in the record from the court's framing of the matter to the party's own response or allegation. Recognizing it correctly prevents misreading the record as containing two separate statements when it is in fact one continuous entry.
The phrase appears most frequently in printed Year Book reports and in Salkeld's reports, which cover late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century King's Bench proceedings. Researchers using those reporters should treat venit et dicit as a pleading marker rather than a term carrying doctrinal weight.
For researchers tracing the evolution of pleading formulas from the manuscript Year Book era into printed reports and then into the formal pleading manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the disappearance of venit et dicit is itself informative. As pleading practice modernized and eventually gave way to code pleading in the nineteenth century, Latin recitals of this kind were shed. Their absence in later sources is not an error in the record — it marks a deliberate simplification.
No jurisdictional variation of substance attaches to this phrase. It is a feature of English common law pleading practice and appears in American colonial and early republic records that closely followed English forms, but it carried no independent legal significance in either context.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree exactly: venit et dicit means "comes and says" and belongs to the vocabulary of old pleading. All three cite 2 Salkeld 544 as the illustrative authority, and Burrill additionally anchors the phrase to the Year Books of Edward II, which places its documented use in the early fourteenth century. The consistency across sources reflects the phrase's status as an uncontested formula rather than a disputed term.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the phrase's relationship to analogous recitals. Venit et dicit is one member of a family of appearance formulas — including venit et defendit and the simple venit — each of which signals a slightly different posture in the record. The dictionaries treat the phrase in isolation; researchers who need to distinguish among these variants will need to consult a pleading treatise or Year Book guide rather than a general law dictionary.
Burrill's reference to the Year Books of Edward II is the most useful historical anchor in the source material, placing the phrase in continuous use across roughly five centuries of common law practice before it fell out of active use.