Section I. Perjury

HISTORY

Early limitations. In Anglo-Saxon legal procedure, judicial oaths played a very important part, being taken both by jurors and by compurgators. Both these classes were punishable for any perjuries they uttered. But the functions of the modern witness had not yet been differentiated from those of the juror; and perjury by witnesses was consequently an unknown crime. And when, in the fourteenth century, witnesses began to be brought in to inform the jury, perjury by them was not made a punishable offence. Hence it became a maxim that the law regarded every witness's oath as true. Even the ecclesiastical courts, though treating breaches of faith in general as matters within their jurisdiction, took no notice of the grave breach of faith involved in giving false witness. But, before the end of the fifteenth century, the Star Chamber sometimes interposed to punish perjuries. And, in the sixteenth century, Parliament itself began to interfere with the immunity of witnesses, dealing in 1540 with subornation of perjury, and in 1562 with perjury itself. But for each of these offences it imposed only a pecuniary penalty, recoverable civilly by a penal action. Finally, however, the Star Chamber, in 1613, declared perjury by a witness to be punishable at common law.

Subsequent extension. The offence thus created was one which could only be committed in a judicial proceeding and by a witness who gave false evidence on oath. But the law gradually came to assume a far more complicated form. Parliament specified various matters which were not judicial proceedings, yet in which the telling a falsehood upon oath was to be a perjury. Again, some classes of witnesses came to be allowed by statute to give evidence in judicial proceedings on mere affirmation, without any oath; and falsehood by them, though no perjury, was made as severely punishable as if it were one.