Definition
Arma reversata (Latin: "reversed arms") is a historical term in English law denoting a ceremonial punishment imposed upon persons adjudged guilty of treason or felony. The sanction consisted of inverting or reversing the condemned person's heraldic arms — that is, displaying their coat of arms upside down or in a dishonored position — as a formal mark of disgrace and attainder. The reversal of arms was a public act of degradation, signaling that the offender had forfeited the honor and standing that heraldic bearings represented.
---
Common Confusion
Arma reversata should not be confused with the broader attainder process, of which reversed arms was only a symbolic component. Attainder itself carried substantive legal consequences — forfeiture of property, corruption of blood, civil death — while arma reversata was essentially a ceremonial expression of those consequences in the language of heraldry. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources should resist treating it as a synonym for attainder or outlawry. It describes the ritual, not the legal machinery that produced it.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in sources concerning medieval and early modern English law, heraldic practice, and the law of treason. Researchers working in those periods should note several things.
First, arma reversata belongs to a cluster of degradation rituals — including the ceremonial breaking of a knight's spurs and the public removal of insignia — that together constituted the symbolic dimension of attainder. The term cannot be fully understood in isolation from that ritual context.
Second, the term is practically absent from post-seventeenth-century legal literature. The decline of heraldry as a living legal institution, and the eventual abolition of attainder's more extreme consequences in English law, rendered arma reversata a dead letter. Researchers using later-period sources or American legal materials will not encounter it as an operative concept.
Third, because the term appears in sources like Cowell's The Interpreter (1607) and similar early glossaries, researchers should treat these as the primary documentary trail. Cross-referencing heraldic law sources and treatises on treason will yield more context than searching standard common law reporters, where the term rarely appears as a term of art in decided cases.
Fourth, the connection to corruption of blood is worth tracing. Both doctrines — arma reversata and corruption of blood — expressed the same legal logic: that attainder did not merely punish the individual but erased the legal identity and heritable honors of the condemned and their line. American constitutional law explicitly abolished bills of attainder and corruption of blood (U.S. Const. art. III, § 3; art. I, § 9), making arma reversata not merely obsolete but constitutionally incompatible with American legal order.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary records the term briefly, defining it as "reversed arms, a punishment for a traitor or felon," and attributes the definition to Cowell. This is consistent with the entry in John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a standard early glossary of legal terms that drew on Roman, civil, and English sources. The brevity of Black's entry reflects the term's status as historical curiosity rather than living doctrine by the time Black's first appeared in the late nineteenth century.
No substantive divergence exists among the sources because there are so few of them. The term does not appear to have generated meaningful doctrinal commentary in the common law reports, and its absence from later legal dictionaries — including later editions of Black's in some printings — confirms that it passed out of active legal use without controversy or evolution. The historical record is thin but consistent.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Arma reversata is an exclusively English legal and heraldic concept. It has no recognized application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. American constitutional prohibitions on bills of attainder and corruption of blood (U.S. Const. art. I, §§ 9–10; art. III, § 3) would render any functional equivalent constitutionally void.
---