medievalbookshop - AHJ0044 Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation

R. H. Helmholz, ed.
Select Cases on Defamation to 1600.
London: Selden Society, 1985.
Main Series, Vol. 101.
ISBN 0854231439.
Hardback, stitch bound; issued without dustjacket.
180x251x23mm.
cxi,118pp.
Latin texts, with facing translations & apparatus in English.
Unused bargain.

How to order this book

Some very diverse materials are chosen to illustrate the development of private remedies for defamation, and to provide the basis for a comparison between the Canon law and the English practice in both the spiritual and temporal courts. The cases come from a wide range of sources - cause papers, act books, local courts, King's Bench and Common Pleas.

The Introduction begins with canonical theory, and an exposition of the text of the English constitution Auctoritate dei patris (1222). Defamation was there defined as maliciously imputing crime (crimen) to a person not already of ill fame, whereby he was harmed in some manner. 'Crime' for this purpose was some external act for which a man might be accused before an earthly judge, spiritual or temporal; but did not properly extend to other sins, let alone blameless misfortunes ('defects'). There are, nevertheless, occasional instances of extension: for instance, to allegations of leprosy, servile or enemy status, bankruptcy, or even mere abuse. From the later fifteenth century the royal courts began to prevent church courts from looking into accusations of temporal crime, thereby creating a gap which they themselves would soon fill. Turning to local courts, the editor shows that they originally had a wide jurisdiction over words, so wide indeed that the underlying law is elusive; but that by 1400 it was gone, perhaps because of 'a tacit compromise with the Church', perhaps because of the theory that words alone did not cause the kind of damage with which temporal courts were concerned - the theory which also delayed the coming of the action on the case for words. The editor argues that the earliest actions on the case in the king's courts (beginning in 1507, common by the 1530s) bear signs of being a direct adaptation of the ecclesiastical remedy, using borrowed wording; and that the original scope of the common-law action can be explained by its canonical antecedents. Contrary to the received view, he contends that slander in a trade or profession was not at first an independent cause of action but only aggravation; and that the mitior sensus doctrine began not as an artificial deterrent to plaintiffs, but as a logical application of the requirement of a 'crime'. On this view, it was only in the late sixteenth century that the common law began to see the damage, independently of the crime, as the cause of action. The Introduction ends with a discussion of the forms of pleading in actions on the case.

You need javascript switched on for these scrollbars to work. If they don't, there's a full set of links at the bottom of this page.

www.medievalbookshop.co.uk