¹ Quoted by Stein, P. and Shand, J., Legal Values in Western Society (Edinburgh, 1974), 131Google Scholar, from Stephen, J. F., General View of the Criminal Law of England (2nd edn., 1890)Google Scholar.

² Stephen, J. F.,A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), i. 244–250Google Scholar; The Roll of the Shropshire Eyre of 1256, ed. Harding, A. (Selden Soc., 96, 1981), xlii–xlvii, 307Google Scholar; Bellamy, J. G., The law of treason in England in the later middle ages (Cambridge, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Criminal Law Act, 1977; Annotated Legislation Service, 249, esp paras. 11–14, 56–8.

⁴ Shaw v D.P.P., [1961] 2 W.L.R., 897 ff.

⁵ Winfield, P. H., The History of Conspiracy and Abuse of Legal Procedure (Cambridge, 1921), 26Google Scholar; the definitive discussion of the early writ of conspiracy is in Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench, ed. Sayles, G. O., iii (Selden Soc., 58, 1939), liv–lxxiGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Harrison, D., Conspiracy as a Crime and as a Tort in English Law (1924), 12–16Google Scholar; the Poulterers' Case is in 9 Rep. 55b, Moore 814.

⁷ Holdsworth, W. S., A history of English law (1922–1938), iii. 402–3, v. 203–5, viii. 382Google Scholar; [1961] 2 W.L.R., p. 915.

⁸ 9 Rep. 55b.

⁹ Capitularia Regum Francorum, ed. Boretius, A. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum Sectio II: Hanover, 1883), i. 124 (805)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See A Latin Dictionary, ed. C.T. Lewis and C. Short, s.vv. conjuro, conspiro; the Corpus Iuris Civilis, D. 1.2.2.24 (proditionis conjurationem … detexerat) and D. 48.19.16 (puniuntur consilia, ut coniurationes et latronum conscientia). Cf. the Vulgate's description of a conjuratio of forty or more jews not to eat or drink till they had killed Paul (Acts 23:13).

¹¹ Capitularia Regum Francorum, i. 124 (805). For Coke's ‘coadunation’ see ibid. 318 (822–3): Volumus de obligationibus, ut nullus homo per sacramentum nee per aliam obligationem adunationem faciat; et si hoc facere praesumpserit, tune de illis qui prius ipsum consilium incoaverit aut qui hoc factum habet in exilio ab ipso comite in Corsica mittatur …’ For further examples of the fear of collective oaths, and the identification of conjuration with conspiracy, see ibid., ii. 299, 309 (prohibition by Charles the Bald and the bishops in 862 of infractiones immunilatum et incendia et assalituras in domos et comurationes et conspirationes et seditiones et raptus feminarum…); and Niermeyer, J. F., Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1954–1976)Google Scholar , s.vv. conjurare, conjuratio, conjurator, conjuratus. Adunatio appears in British sources from c.800: Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, prepared by Latham, R. E. (1965)Google Scholar, s.v. For the use of conspiratio and conjuratio together in a political context in the twelfth century, see Vitalis, Orderic, Ecclesiastical History, ed. Chibnall, M. (Oxford, 1969–1980), i. 274, 277, ii. 212, 216, 307, 314, iv. 82, 268, 278, 280, 284, vi. 32, 334. 448Google Scholar.

¹² Capitularia Regum Francorum, i. 56, 77, ii. 177, 309.

¹³ In Anglo-Saxon law, an accused priest was only put to the ordeal if he was destitute of friends to act as consacramentales, and then but to the mild ordeal of panem conjuratam, the morsel of bread conjured to choke the guilty man. The ordeals were themselves brought within the concept of conjuration, which acquired the secondary meaning of the solemn invocation of the instruments of the ordeal to show God's judgment: Liebermann, F., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle, 1898–1916), i. 281, 286,405, 424, ii. 39Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Lucet, B., Les Codifications Cisterciennes de 1237 et de 1257 (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1977), D. IV. 2–3, V. 18, VI. 5, 11, VII. 12, X. 7, 9, XV. 10Google Scholar. Gratian's canon excluding proved conspirators from acting as accusers in the church courts must stem from an awareness of the corruption which a judicial system dependent on collective oaths was liable to; but in the Decretum also the conjurationum et conspirationum crimen prohibited by all ‘public laws’ is a wider political factionalism amongst the clergy (Causae III, q.4, c.5; XI, q.i, c.21).

¹⁵ King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , iii, p. cxxiiiGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Decretum, Causa III, q. 4, c. 5; Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, f. 118b, tr. Thorne, S. E., ii (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 335Google Scholar. Bracton also takes from the Digest D. 48.1 g. 16) a list of crimes which includes consilia, ut coniurationes (f. 105; tr. Thorne, ii, 299; cf. Winfield, , The History of Conspiracy, 93Google Scholar). He might also have known the passage in the Digest (D. 42.1.33) concerning witnesses bribed by the ‘conspiracy’ of the opposing parties.

¹⁷ Harding, A., ‘Plaints and Bills in the History of English Law, mainly in the period 1250–1350’, Legal History Studies 1972, ed. Jenkins, D. (Cardiff, 1975), esp. 75–6Google Scholar.

¹⁸ King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , vii (Selden Soc., 88, 1971), 191Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Conjuratus could mean conspirator, fellow-monk or fellow-juror (Latham, , Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, 107)Google Scholar. As De Mutuis sacramentis, the order to the justices became a permanent new chapter of the eyre: Cam, H. M., Studies in the hundred rolls (Oxf. Stud, in Soc. and Legal Hist., ed. Vinogradoff, P., vi, 1921), 56–9Google Scholar.

²⁰ King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , i (Selden Soc., 55, 1936), 76Google Scholar. For conspiracy in a civil plea in 1290, see Rotuli Parliamentorum, i. 58–9.

²¹ Rot. Parl., i. 96a; Winfield, History of Conspiracy, chap. II; King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , iii, pp. liv–lxxiGoogle Scholar.

²² King's Bench, ed. Sayles, iii, pp. 61–2, 81–2, 84–6Google Scholar; cf. The Eyre of London, 1321, ed. Cam, H.M., ii (Selden Soc., 86, 1969), 357Google Scholar.

²³ King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , ii, 168; iii, 18, 22–3, 34, 49–50, 84–6Google Scholar. Some of the early cases did not allege corruption of juries at all: ibid., 61–2, 73–4, 80–1. The conspiracy of lone defendants seems to have consisted in the way they corrupted the proceedings of a court, whether by pleading forged documents or subverting juries. As counsel said in a plea of 1312, ‘conspiracy supposeth that false allegations and deceit were employed to the detriment of the other party contrary to the form of law’: year Book of 5 Edward II, ed. Bolland, W. C. (Selden Soc., 33, 1916), 215Google Scholar . The connection with court proceedings is borne out by the fact that the writ of conspiracy was originally regarded as a judicial writ: King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , iii, 22–3Google Scholar; but cf. Early Registers of Writs, ed. de Haas, Elsa and Hall, G. D. G. (Selden Soc., 87, 1970), cxxiii, cxxvii, lxxxv, cxxiv–cxxxv)Google Scholar. The church courts suffered in the same way: in King's Bench, a Nottinghamshire vicar was accused of conspiracy to present and defame a woman before the visitor of the arch-bishop of York for adultery with a monk; and the Prior of St Neot's complained of a conspiracy which included getting a woman to appeal him of rape, accusing him to the bishop of Lincoln of incontinence with the same woman, and declaring that he had raised the standard of the king of France on his church and was expelling all the monks who spoke English (King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , iii, 50–2, 95–6)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 106–8. In another case, a parson complained that, because he would not supply them with corn, eight men conspired to denounce him to the receiver of querelae against the clergy as having excommunicated a royal bailiff, a charge it was exceedingly difficult to disprove (ibid., 82–3).

²⁵ Statutes of the Realm, i. 139. Cf. Britton, ed. Nichols, F. M. (Oxford, 1865)Google Scholar, bk. 1, chap. 22, sect. 19, and King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , iii, pp. liv–lv, lxxGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Harding, A., ‘Early trailbaston proceedings from the Lincoln roll of 1305’, in Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C. A. F. Meekings, ed. Hunnisett, R. F. and Post, J. B. (1978), 144–9Google Scholar; Sayles prints the letters between the king and the justices at York in King's Bench, ii, pp. cxlix-di; for the Ordinance of Conspirators, see Rot. Part., i, 183, and Statutes of the Realm, i, 145. The procuring of false indictments and assize-verdicts from packed juries remained the unifying thread of the offence in the trailbaston proceedings: Harding, , ‘Early trailbaston proceedings’, nos. 46, 47, 50, 51, 52Google Scholar; Wiltshire Gaol Delivery and Trailbaston Rolls, 1275–1306, ed. Pugh, R. B. (Wilts. Rec. Soc, 23: Devizes 1978), nos. 935, 947, 963–5, 1009Google Scholar; Law and Order in Fourteenth Century Cheshire: The Trailbaston Roll 0f 1353, ed. Booth, P. H. W. (University of Liverpool Institute of Extension Studies: 12 1975)Google Scholar, nos. 43, 46–51. But the ordinance of 1305 shifted the focus to the bands of retainers by whom the administration of justice was being perverted: the phrase ‘such as maintain Men in the Country with Liveries or fees for to maintain their malicious Enterprises’ cannot be dismissed as a vague appendage, as it is by Winfield (History of Conspiracy, 2).

²⁷ Eyre of London, ed. Cam, , i (Selden Soc., 85, 1968), xxv, cxi–cxiii, 16, 27, 40–2, 44Google Scholar.

²⁸ Rot. Parl., i. 201a, 289a, 299a, 330b; ii. 60a, 137a, 142b, 165a, 407b; iii. 627b; iv. iao, 127a, 147a, 421a; v. 28. See iii. 288b for an allegation of conspiracy to give false information to the king's council which was discussed in Parliament.

²⁹ Rot. Parl., vi. 287b, 288a.

³⁰ Calendar ofChancery Warrants, i. 241–2.

³¹ Tear Books 0f 5 Edward II (1311–12), ed. Bolland, W. C. (Selden Soc., 31, 1915), 114–16Google Scholar; Eyre of London, 1321, ed. Cam, , ii, 356–7Google Scholar; Rot. Parl., i. 201a (no. 63), ii. 259b, 265b; iii. 306a, 318a; Calendar of Close Rolls, 1302–7, 397.

³² Rot. Parl., i. 219.

³³ Ibid., 283b.

³⁴ Bellamy, Law of Treason, chap. 4, esp. 90–1. ‘Conspiring’ is very often joined with ‘compassing and imagining’ in the description of late medieval treasons, but only to emphasise the length of the preparation of the attack on the king. The association did not in itself constitute treason, and Coke insists that the ‘compassing, intent or imagination, though secret’ must be proved by an overt act, such as the obtaining of weapons, powder or poison, for the execution of the conspiracy:Fifty- Third Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1892), 28–33; Rot. Parl., vi. 436b; Holdsworth, , History of English Law, iii. 291, viii. 311Google Scholar.

³⁵ Rot. Parl., ii. 117. See King's Bench, ed. Sayles, , vi, 94–7Google Scholar, for an example of a sworn confederacy at Guildford in 1354, which succeeded in gaining control of the commission of the peace. Indictments before the justices of the peace reveal the same types of activity at a lower level: confederacies and unlawful agreements by local officials and tax-collectors to extort money for their own use, intertwined with conspiracies to maintain false quarrels and procure false indictments. Even the confederacy and conspiracy of two men to alter the date on a notarial instrument pleaded in a case in a church court between a parson and his parishioners was the subject of an indictment before the J.P.s, because this was held to undermine the procedures of church law and the peace of the lord king and the tranquillity of his people in the said parish: Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Putnam, B. H. (The Ames Foundation: Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1938), 69, 71, 72, 221, 362, 385–6, 408Google Scholar.

³⁶ 37 Geo. 3, c. 123; cf. 52 Geo. 3, c. 104.

³⁷ Statutes of the Realm, ii. 589–90; Gordon, M. D., ‘The Perjury Statute of 1563; A Case History of Confusion’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124 (1980), 446–8Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Invention of a Common Law Crime: Perjury and the Elizabethan Courts’, American Journal of Legal History, 24 (1980), 152, 165–6.

³⁸ Holdsworth, , History of English Law, viii. 386–7Google Scholar; Radzinowicz, L., A History of English Criminal Law (1948–1968), ii. 326 ffGoogle Scholar. In 1816, three London policemen were sentenced to death for aiding and abetting the crime of counterfeiting which they had inveigled some Irishmen into committing: they almost got away with their plot because they swore their victims to secrecy and the Irishmen, as Catholics, would not break their oaths even when they realised they had been duped (ibid., 336).

³⁹ Shaw v. D.P.P. [1961] 2 W.L.R., 909, 915, 923; Rex v. Delaval [1763] 3 Burr. 1434. The moralising may have been necessary because, as Lord Tucker pointed out in Shawv. D.P.P. (930), ‘the girl's master was willing and she was not in the custody of her father’.

⁴⁰ Rot. Parl., iii. 42–3, 81; Statutes of the Realm, ii. 9–10; cf. P.R.O., Just. 1/437, m. 11 for a Lancashire case of 1357 which seems to fit the description; raptus feminarum was associated with Carolingian conspiracies (footnote 12 above).

⁴¹ Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace, ed. Putnam, , 386Google Scholar.

⁴² Harrison, , Conspiracy as a Crime and as a Tort, 16–17, 29, 110, 120Google Scholar.

⁴³ Harrison, ibid., 21–2, 82 ff.

⁴⁴ 5Geo. 4, c. 95.

⁴⁵ Capitularia Regum Francorum, i. 51 (c. 16), 64 (c. 26), 301 (c. 7); Annales Bertiniani, ed. Waitz, G. (MGH Scriptores, 1883), 51Google Scholar; Niermeyer, Lexicon Minus, s.v. conjurare; Duby, G., The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, tr. Goldhammer, A. (Chicago and London, 1980), 28–30, 186, 216Google Scholar; Constitutions et actapublica imperatorum el regum, i (911–1197), ed. Weiland, L. (MGH Legum Sectio IV, 1893), 246Google Scholar; cf. Bisson, T. N.. ‘The Organized Peace in Southern France and Catalonia, ca. 1140-ca. 1233’, Amer. Hist. Rev., 82 (1977), 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the institution of peace at Montpellier, followed immediately by a prohibition of ‘conjurations and conspiracies’, and all confraternities except those approved by lords or bishops ‘for urgent necessity or evident utility’.

⁴⁶ de Beaumanoir, Philippe, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. Salmon, A. (Paris, 1899–1900), 446–9Google Scholar; for the conspiracies or takehans of Flemish towns in the late thirteenth century, see Les Olim ou Registres des Arrêts rendus par la Cour du Roi, ed. Beugnot, Comte (Paris, 1842), ii. 64 (no. xi), 116 (xxvi), 326–7Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Lex Ribuaria, ed. Beyerle, F. and Buchner, R. (MGH Legum Sectio i, 1954), 114 (1.6), 110 (1.11), 119 (114)Google Scholar; Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. Zeumer, K. (MGH Legum Sectio v, 1882–1886), 213–14Google Scholar; Capitularia Regum Francorum, i. 191 (c. 9), 268 (c. 2), 315 (c. 2) ; Hyams, P. R., ‘The proof of villein status in the common law’, Engl. Hist. Rev., 89 (1974), 721–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the lords' perennial fear of conspiracies by their serfs, ministeriales and freedmen, see D. 1.12.1.10 of the Corpus Juris Civilis; the Bamberg Dientstrecht (1057–64) in Monumenta Bambergensia, ed. Jaffe, P. (Berlin, 1869), 50ffGoogle Scholar; Lucet, Les Codifications Cisterciennes, D. x. 9.

⁴⁸ Wiltshire Gaol Delivery and Trailbaston Rolls, ed. Pugh, no. 1009; Hilton, R. H., ‘Peasant movements in England before 1381’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. II (1949)Google Scholar, reprinted in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson, ii. 83–4.

⁴⁹ The Ledger-Book of Vale Royal Abbey, ed. Brownbill, J. (Lanes, and Ches. Rec. Soc., lxviii, 1914), 31–2, 37–42Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1377–81, 204; Putnam, , Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace, 11Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Holdsworth, History of English Law, v. 204, n. 4; Select Cases before the King's Council in the Star Chamber, ii (1509–44), ed. Leadam, I. S. (Selden Soc., 25, 1910), 38 ff, 184 ftGoogle Scholar: in the first case it was complained that ‘the inhabitants of the said whole town of Thingden contrary to your peace laws and statutes … doth assemble themselves and do confederate and combinate themselves … and call common councils … and make a common purse’, and in the second there was talk of ‘alliances’, ‘confederates’ and ‘false conspiracy and covin’.

⁵² Putnam, B. H., The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers (New York, 1908), Appx. 8–11Google Scholar.

⁵³ Rot Parl., ii. 234a.

⁵⁴ Statutes of the Realm, i. 367 (34 Edw. 3, c. 9).

⁵⁵ Rot. Part, iii. 330–1.

⁵⁶ Ibid., ii. 251.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 350b.

⁵⁸ Réville, A. and Petit-Dutaillis, C., Lesoulèvementdestravailleurs a” Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898), 190–7, 260 ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 177, 180, 184, 186, 187, 192, 199, 206, 253–4, 256, 267. Cf. P.R.O., KB 9/166/2, where an Essex leader is indicted of assembling the men of a township and swearing them to revolt. In the summer of 1381 the villeins of the abbot of Chester were said to have ‘gathered in secret confederacies within the woods and hidden places’.

⁶⁰ KB 9/42/1, mm. 16–17, for example.

⁶¹ Putnam, B. H., Early Treatises on the Practice of the Justices of the Peace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Oxf. Stud, in Soc. and Legal Hist., ed. Vinogradoff, P., vii, 1924), 372–3Google Scholar. Marowe says nothing of oaths; common purses and strike funds were already more important at the level of popular conspiracies.

⁶² Harding, A., ‘Political Liberty in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 55 (1980), 423–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Rot. Part., iii. 331; 2 & 3 Edw. 6, c. 15.