Advertisement
Articles

A Felonious State of Mind: Mens Rea in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England

A Felonious State of Mind: Mens Rea in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England

By Elizabeth Papp Kamali

PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2015

Three Men before a Judge - Ms. Ludwig XIV 6, fol, 135v
Three Men before a Judge – Ms. Ludwig XIV 6, fol, 135v

Abstract: This dissertation explores the role of mens rea, or guilty mind, as a factor in jury assessments of guilt and innocence during the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury, from the early thirteenth through the fourteenth century. Drawing upon evidence from the plea rolls, but also relying heavily upon non-legal textual sources, including popular literature and guides for confessors, I argue that mind was central to how jurors determined whether a particular defendant should be convicted, pardoned, or acquitted outright. I analyze the meaning of the word “felony,” demonstrating that its meaning was considerably more complex in the medieval context than it is now, when it tends to serve as a placeholder for a category of serious crime. An examination of the word’s use in medieval England’s three primary languages—Latin, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman French—reveals that “felony” was often used interchangeably with such concepts as malice, iniquity, treason, and evil. Furthermore, jury acquittals and pardon recommendations reveal a default understanding of felony that involved, in its paradigmatic form, three essential elements: an act that was reasoned, willed in a way not constrained by necessity, and evil or wicked in its essence.

Further chapters explore the complicating role of anger, which could exacerbate or reduce the level of guilt attached to an alleged felony; the contours and mechanisms of guilt assessment, including the gradation of particular sins and crimes and the use of confession to access guilty mind; and the peculiar dangers and difficulties involved in the task of judging, a task shared by judges and jurors within the medieval English system of felony adjudication. The dissertation engages with a long-standing discussion on the history of the medieval English criminal trial jury while also initiating a new discourse on this early chapter in the long Anglo-American history of ideas about criminal responsibility. It introduces a new methodological approach for the study of the early criminal trial jury, placing legal texts within a broader cultural context in order to illuminate the concerns of jurors otherwise largely silenced by the formality and brevity of the legal record.

Advertisement
Click here to check out this issue of our magazine
Click here to check out this issue of our magazine

Introduction: “Reum non facit nisi mens rea.” Appearing in an early twelfth-century English legal compilation, but traceable to Augustine perhaps by way of Ivo of Chartres, this maxim rings familiar to modern lawyers as a principle fundamental to the Anglo-American common law tradition: culpability depends upon the presence of mens rea, or guilty mind. Equally fundamental to the common law tradition, but not equally celebrated, is the harsh nature of medieval felony law: a person found guilty of felony—whether homicide, theft, arson, or rape, for example—faced punishment of death, typically by hanging. Judgment resided largely in the hands of lay jurors, who issued a verdict that might send an accused man or woman back to prison to await a pardon, into the world as a free individual, or to the gallows. When faced with such stark punishment, did medieval English jurors apply the above maxim in a meaningful way? If so, how did they ascertain what lay hidden within an accused individual’s heart and mind?

Click here to read this thesis from the University of Michigan

Advertisement