Definition
The traditional oral response delivered by a prisoner at the bar when asked how they wished to be tried. Upon arraignment, after pleading not guilty, the court clerk would ask: "How will you be tried?" The defendant's prescribed answer was "By God and my country" — signifying submission to trial by jury of one's peers, with "God" invoking divine sanction over the proceedings and "my country" denoting the jury drawn from the community. The clerk would then complete the exchange with "God send you a good deliverance."
The phrase is a ritualized formula, not a substantive legal statement. Its significance lies entirely in its procedural function: the defendant's declaration of consent to jury trial. It was not an oath, not a plea, and not a waiver in the modern doctrinal sense — it was the closing step of the arraignment ceremony that formally committed the case to trial by jury.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not entered as a standard phrase. Survives primarily as an archaic or literary expression conveying appeal to divine and communal judgment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently entered. The component words carry their plain meanings — an invocation of God and a reference to one's native land or community.
The gap here is total: in ordinary language, neither meaning applies. This is a fixed legal formula with no living common usage. Its "country" means jury, not nation-state — a meaning invisible to any reader without exposure to common law arraignment procedure.
Common Confusion
The word "country" in this formula is routinely misread by modern researchers as a reference to the sovereign, the Crown, or the state as a prosecuting party. It means none of these things. "My country" in this context is a term of art for the jury — specifically, the jury of the vicinage, the community from which the defendant's peers are drawn. This usage is consistent with the older legal phrase "putting oneself upon the country," meaning submission to jury trial. Conflating "country" with "the Crown" or "the prosecution" produces a fundamentally incorrect reading of the arraignment record.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English criminal records, trial transcripts, or treatise literature from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries will encounter this formula with some regularity. Several research traps apply.
First, the phrase appears as a scribal abbreviation in older records — sometimes rendered as "per Deum et patriam" in Latin entries or reduced to shorthand notations in clerk's minutes. Recognizing the formula in compressed form is essential to correctly parsing what stage of proceedings a document reflects.
Second, the formula marks a specific procedural moment: the completion of arraignment and the formal commitment to jury trial. Documents recording "By God and my country" confirm that a not-guilty plea had already been entered and that the case was proceeding to trial. This makes the phrase a reliable procedural timestamp in historical criminal records.
Third, the phrase is absent from American practice almost entirely. Colonial American courts abandoned much of the formal English arraignment ceremony, and post-independence American criminal procedure diverged quickly. A researcher applying English procedural knowledge to American records, or vice versa, should not expect this formula to appear in American sources with any regularity.
Fourth, the formula's disappearance from English practice was gradual. It remained in use long after it ceased to carry any genuine legal weight, surviving as ceremonial vestige. Later sources may treat it as quaint or already obsolete even while recording it. Dating the sources you consult matters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence give a clean, compact entry locating the phrase within arraignment procedure and correctly identifying "country" as the jury. Their treatment is accurate as a snapshot of the formula's function but does not engage with the formula's evolution, its Latin antecedents, or the broader ceremony of which it was a part. What they capture is the terminal-stage meaning — the phrase as it existed when English legal procedure was being systematically codified for reference works — rather than its full procedural history.
Older English procedural authorities, including Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown and Chitty's Criminal Law, situate the formula within a more complete account of arraignment, including the clerk's full colloquy and the significance of "putting oneself upon the country." Those sources provide essential context that a dictionary entry alone cannot supply. Researchers who need to understand why the formula existed, not merely what it meant, should consult treatise-level sources rather than stopping at the dictionary definition.
No historical dictionary source consulted gives adequate treatment to the Latin equivalent or to the formula's behavior in equity or ecclesiastical proceedings, where jury trial was unavailable and the phrase would not have appeared at all.
Jurisdictional Note
This formula is specific to English common law criminal procedure. It does not appear as a formal requirement in American, Scottish, or Irish practice in any consistent way. Researchers working outside English criminal records should treat any appearance of equivalent language as requiring independent verification of local procedural custom.