The Invention of a Common Law Crime: Perjury and the Elizabethan Courts

Abstract

The impetus for this study was concern with the place of statutes within the English common law during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There seems to have been significant shift in attitudes towards statutory law between the medieval and early modern periods; specifically, while some medieval statutes were perceived by contemporaries as innovative, by the seventeenth century statutes tended to be regarded otherwise, as confirmation of pre-existing law and not as innovative.' It is clear, however, that regardless of how they were viewed by contemporaries, were innovative statutes in the sixteenth century; one need not go farther than the great Henrician statutes of Uses and Wills (27 Henry 8, c. 10, 32 Henry 8, c. 1).2 If, then, the was reluctant to recognize innovation, how did this mind deal with innovative statutes, i.e., ones creating new procedures, remedies, and/or crimes? The question becomes critical when asked of the later Tudor period during which, according to Pocock, there occurred great hardening and consolidation of common-law thought.3 This study is not, however, direct response to Pocock's call for a detailed study of Tudor common-law thought which would show how and when it came into being.4 Rather, it approaches this issue from far more narrow focus. This study involves an examination of one particular statute, the Perjury Statute of 1563 (5 Elizabeth, c. 9) and the treat-