Trespass on the case

Abstract

In the fourteenth century a variety of new kinds of action appeared in the royal courts as a result of allowing writs of trespass to be issued without the ‘force and arms’ clause. In such writs the plaintiff had to set out the gist of his ‘special case’ in lieu of the generalized assertion of force. This chapter shows how contemporaries regarded ‘actions on the case’ and what was considered to be their range. Some later discussions in the chapter show lawyers trying to rationalize the distinction between ‘trespass’ (that is, trespass with force and arms) and ‘case’ in terms of physical directness.