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Chapter  The Ambiguity of Treason in AngloNorman -French Law, c. –c.  Stephen D. White In a celebrated and much-quoted passage on treason in England before the late thirteenth century, F. W. Maitland called it ‘‘a crime which has a vague circumference, and more than one centre.’’ Drawing primarily on a close analysis of the Latin legal texts Glanvill and Bracton’s De legibus, as well as on his reading of late Anglo-Saxon law codes, Maitland usefully highlighted the ambiguity of the concept of treason and identified several disparate and equally elusive ideas that were somehow bound up in it. One of these, which he characterized as ‘‘primarily indicated by the word betray ,’’ Maitland took to encompass ‘‘a betraying of the army or of the realm,’’ aiding the king’s enemies, and also flight from battle. Another idea was infidelity to a lord, which he construed to entail perjury because it included ‘‘offences . . . regarded as the vilest breaches of the vassal’s troth’’— that is, the oath of fidelity customarily sworn to kings and to other lords as well. Treason also had, in Maitland’s words, ‘‘a Roman element,’’ namely the crimen laesae maiestatis or lèse-majesté, which ‘‘the royal lawyers,’’ as he called them, construed as something akin to ‘‘treason against the state.’’ Finally, Maitland discerned yet another idea associated with treason when he wrote that ‘‘in marked contrast to the general drift of our old criminal law, the crime was in this case found, not in a harmful result, but in the endeavour to produce it [through] ‘‘machination, ‘compassing,’ [or] ‘imagining ’.’’ In other words, treason was somehow connected, Maitland believed , to plotting, scheming, and treachery. It was, as he noted, ‘‘the crime of Judas,’’ whom Dante placed along with other traitors in the lowest reaches of Hell.1 In , the statute  Edward III, stat. , c. , which was drafted in French, clarified the meaning of treason (treson) by specifying the offenses that fell under it, including the levying of war (guerre) against the king,  Stephen D. White which previous statements about the law of treason had not mentioned.2 Before this statute’s enactment, according to Maitland’s line of reasoning, treason had been such an unstable, ideological, contested, and overtly politicized category of wrongdoing that there could have been no firm consensus even about what offenses the term covered, much less how they were to be defined or proven or who should suffer the ‘‘peculiarly ghastly’’ punishments reserved for traitors, namely mutilation and/or execution and forfeiture of all property to the king.3 In particular, Maitland believed that it was unclear, prior to , whether rebellion against the king was necessarily treason. Those who understood treason as a crime against the state, he implied , surely saw rebellion in this way. But as long as treason could also be understood as ‘‘infidelity,’’ Maitland argued, ‘‘men would not have been brought to admit in perfectly general terms that the subject who levies war against the king is a traitor’’4 because they had not fully abandoned the idea that ‘‘if a lord persistently refuses justice to his man, the tie of fealty is broken , the man may openly defy his lord and, having done so, may make war on him.’’ Besides, if an essential element of treason was not the ‘‘harmful result, but . . . the endeavour to produce it’’ through plotting or other kinds of underhanded behavior, then it would have been difficult to cast an honorable man who justifiably defied the king in the dishonorable role of the traitor. Instead of pursuing Maitland’s argument about the ambiguity of treason during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in England, subsequent writers engaged in a sharply polarized debate about whether aristocratic rebellion—that is, ‘‘levying war’’ against the king—was treason by definition before  Edward III, stat. , c. . J. E. A. Jolliffe insisted that it was not, because treason was ‘‘infidelity’’ under feudal law. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles countered that since ‘‘treason’’ was lèse-majesté, not infidelity, rebels must have been deemed traitors. J. G. Bellamy thought it ‘‘probable that [before the late thirteenth century] the feudal law [protected ] those who levied war on the king in his realm.’’ More recently, however , John Gillingham has contended that ‘‘rebellion was always treason’’ in medieval England, but that kings chose ‘‘not to execute aristocratic rebels ’’ from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century because of...

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