Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/325

 n s. i. APR. 16, 1910.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

317

12. S. T. Coleridge, 'Death of Wallen- stein/ V. i.

13. Wm. Roscoe, ; Lines written in 1788 ' (parodied in The Anti- Jacobin}.

15. Compare w The Tempest,' I. ii. : " My affections are then most humble."

17. Akenside, ' Pleasures of Imagination ' (second version), 367-9. R. A- POTTS.

If C. B. W. will refer to the notes to the collected edition of Hazlitt's works, edited by Arnold Glover and myself in thirteen volumes in 1902-6, and to the Addenda to those notes in vol. xii., he will find the sources of thirteen out of his fourteen Hazlitt quotations. We did not succeed in identifying his fourteenth :

Out of my country and myself I go.

A. R. WALLER.

[Mu. F. FIRTH, PROF. SKEAT, PROF. SMITH, and T. M. W. also thanked for identifica- tions. Reply from PROF. STRACHAX next week.]

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO (11 S. i. 107,

192). In connexion with this subject, those

-ted should read the two articles which

Mr. C. H. Bromby contributed to The

Athenceum for 17 and 24 Sept., 1898.

W. ROBERTS.

"CULPRIT" (10 S. xi. 486; xii. 174, 456; 11 S. i. 99). The translation of the judge's question and the reply of defend- ant's counsel, as quoted by MR. WHITWELL at 10 S. xii. 174 from the ' Liber Assisarum,' I take to be :

/.'. dc Bank. You did him an injury when you overloaded the boat, by which means plaintiff's mare was lost ; what is your answer ?

Ilii-hm. Defendant is not to blame [now cul.~\. We are prepared to adduce evidence (or to prove our case) [prist d'averrer noire bille],

The more amplified report of the suit I given at the above reference than that found in the ' N.E.D.' must be my excuse for regarding the two versions as distinct cases ; but, on the other hand, MR. WHITWELL has also erred in quoting the citation from 'La Graunde Abridgement 1 (1586), which he gives as 22 Edw. III. pi. 41, whereas tli ' X.E.D.* cites the same as 22 Edw. I. pi. 41 ; or else the latter authority is wrong.

It is impossible to render the formula, non cut prit as ' ' not guilty n (which is what MR. WHITWELL seems to assume it does mean here), from the fact that the action j pending is a civil and not a criminal one ; ! and the same remark applies to the two "th<T instances cited by the 'N.E.D.,' viz.. 35 Edw. I. Rolls, 451, and 12 Edw. III. Plea 15. The formula was doubtless in use

both in the civil and criminal courts about this time ; and even at the present day the term " culpable n subsists in the civil phrase " culpable negligence," as well as in the criminal ones " culpable bankruptcy " and "culpable homicide." "Culpable," however, during the Plantagenet period seems to have been the word in general use to denote " guilty " in the truly legal sense. Thus the ' N.E.D.' informs us that Lang- land in 1377 wrote of " any creature that is coupable afore a kynges justice " ; while a reference is given from the year 1480, showing that the word was also used sub- stantively : "every unthryftye culpable." Chaucer, too, has it in the ' Tale of Melibasus l (1380) in the more restricted connotation of " censurable " ; which is the signification it still bears in English civil law. The word " guilty,"! find from the Oxford Dictionary, has in its earlier usage generally a theological or ethical application ; and the same may be said of " guilt," the etymology of which has yet to be traced to its true source. The former designation, to judge from the references in the ' N.E.D.,' was less common in its legal acceptation during the early period than "culpable," signifying "the prisoner at the bar," the first good example dating from 1450 : " He was arreyned. . . . upon the appechementes . . . .and fonde gylty " (' Paston Letters'); while an instance of " guilt," in the legal sense merely, is given from R. de Brunne's ' Chronicle ' (1330) : " If a clerke men founde in his lond ]>at reft, porgh slauhter or wounde, or ]>orgh o]>er theft, Men suld schewe, his guilte in ]>e courte of lay."*

Culprit is thus defined in Black's * Dic- tionary of Law, 1 St. Paul, Minn., 1891 :

"A person who is indicted for a criminal offence, but is not yet convicted. It is not, however, a technical term of the law ; and in its vernacular usage it seems to imply a light degree of censure or moral reprobation."

From the sequence of these remarks, it will, I think, be clear that the first two definitions of " culprit " in the 'N.E.D.' require amending. Inasmuch as the word became current, so far as is known, only about the year 1678, it is quite possible that it was coined, not in the Plantagenet or Tudor times, but during the troublous years of the Commonwealth, that is to say, between the death of Charles I. in 1649 and the accession of Charles II. in 1660, when, as Blackstone observes, in legal parlance, there was " no law." Such an epoch, at any rate

been omitted by the editors of the ' N.E.D.,' s.v.
 * This variant of " Law" has inadvertently