This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Zoë Jackson (Twitter: @ZoeMJackson1, Bluesky: @zoejackson.bsky.social) is a PhD student at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, researching the relationship between memory and perjury in later seventeenth-century England.
Zoë Jackson
From personal experience ‘perjury’ (intentionally lying under oath in a legal setting) is not a widely understood term amongst most people today. Whenever I explain my research, I usually have to define what perjury is (and sometimes must clarify that I’m not specifically concerned with other, similar sounding terms – ‘purgatory’, anyone?) Calling someone a ‘perjurer’ today would probably get you, at most, a quizzical look.
But in early modern England, as Mary Basnett was made fully aware, calling someone a ‘perjurer’ was grounds for a defamation suit. In November 1673, the Consistory Court of Chester ordered Mary Basnett to perform penance in the parish church of Frodsham, by reciting before the congregation the following words: ‘Whereas I Mary Basnett have wronged Alice Gee in rashly saying, If shee hath taken such an oath shee is forsworne, I am heartily sorry for the same, for I know no such crime of her, and I desyre her to forgive mee’. In the court case that preceded this judgment, multiple witnesses testified to hearing Mary Basnett accusing Alice Gee of taking a false oath in a previous trial.[1]
Legal disputes like this one between Mary Basnett and Alice Gee are of interest to me for what they reveal about local understandings of perjury (as opposed to the formal definitions you find in legal treatises and dictionaries). Perjury was a crime in early modern England, but it was also a sin, breaching both the Third Commandment (against taking God’s name in vain) and the Ninth Commandment (against bearing false witness). In church court defamation cases, witnesses described whether or not accusations of perjury were made, and what damage this did to the alleged perjurer’s reputation. As historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and others have established, although these records do not represent the direct words of the people, they can still be useful in illuminating contemporary attitudes and practices, such as in this case around the functioning of community.
Continue reading