Chirographs in Roman law: constitutive or evidential?

Abstract

Summary It has recently been sustained that chirographs had only evidential value and no constitutive effect in classical Roman law. That is correct regarding their origin in Roman law, however, the nature of a chirograph was such that as evidence it was effectively constitutive. Only the remedies later created (the exceptio and later the querimonia non numeratae pecuniae) provided relief. They and the actiones utiles granted to acquirers of chirographs prove that in the course of time chirographs were considered by their users as constitutive, if not already declared so. It appears from the Murecine texts where debtors declare themselves indebted by chirographs that this situation may already have existed in the middle of the first century ad. Hence we should accept the possibility of an early shift in legal categorisation of the chirograph to a contractus litteris.