Perjury and Memory in the English Law Courts, 1660–1688
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis explores the relationships between memory and witness perjury, or lying under oath, in the law courts of later seventeenth-century England. Although there has been excellent work on perjury in early modern England, this work is limited for the later seventeenth century, and does not interrogate questions of memory. Memory is a fertile but underused lens through which to explore the concept of perjury because it formed the basis, in theory, for all witness testimony, and therefore illuminates how contemporaries thought about the accuracy of their memories as witness testimony, as well as how people remembered past legal disputes. Furthermore, contemporary attitudes towards perjury have not informed the rich scholarship on early modern memory in legal settings. Contemporary understandings of perjury are particularly interesting to consider in this period, when the divisions of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars and a rise in partisanship had eliminated any certainty in the meaning of ‘truth’, as several scholars have demonstrated. This thesis therefore expands the scholarship on early modern perjury by considering the neglected question of how it was understood in connection with memory, and by exploring this relationship in the specific context of the later seventeenth century, and its debates about truth. This thesis begins by tracing contemporary definitions of perjury from the medieval period to the seventeenth century, and their religious and secular implications. The remainder of the thesis approaches the relationship between memory and perjury through different law courts, from the local Quarter Sessions and the consistory courts to the Court of King’s Bench. It explores different types of remembering that could inform witness testimony, including individual memory, collective memory, and customary memory. It also assesses if and how local understandings of perjury differed from the more formal legal definitions being used at the higher courts, …
abstract: This thesis explores the relationships between memory and witness perjury, or lying under oath, in the law courts of later seventeenth-century England. Although there has been excellent work on perjury in early modern England, this work is limited for the later seventeenth century, and does not interrogate questions of memory. Memory is a fertile but underused lens through which to explore the concept of perjury because it formed the basis, in theory, for all witness testimony, and therefore illuminates how contemporaries thought about the accuracy of their memories as witness testimony, as well as how people remembered past legal disputes. Furthermore, contemporary attitudes towards perjury have not informed the rich scholarship on early modern memory in legal settings. Contemporary understandings of perjury are particularly interesting to consider in this period, when the divisions of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars and a rise in partisanship had eliminated any certainty in the meaning of ‘truth’, as several scholars have demonstrated. This thesis therefore expands the scholarship on early modern perjury by considering the neglected question of how it was understood in connection with memory, and by exploring this relationship in the specific context of the later seventeenth century, and its debates about truth. This thesis begins by tracing contemporary definitions of perjury from the medieval period to the seventeenth century, and their religious and secular implications. The remainder of the thesis approaches the relationship between memory and perjury through different law courts, from the local Quarter Sessions and the consistory courts to the Court of King’s Bench. It explores different types of remembering that could inform witness testimony, including individual memory, collective memory, and customary memory. It also assesses if and how local understandings of perjury differed from the more formal legal definitions being used at the higher courts, …
author: Jackson, Zoe
language: eng
keywords: English history, early modern history, social history, legal history, memory, perjury
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b8912786-a734-4728-8380-1bfde55ac499/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2024-05-09
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:25Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.113984