Definition
An adverb meaning in a bodily or fleshly manner; specifically, in legal usage, with reference to sexual intercourse. The term appears almost exclusively in the phrase "carnally know" or "carnally knew," which historically served as the operative language in statutes and indictments for rape, carnal knowledge of a child, and related sexual offenses. To have carnally known a person meant to have had sexual intercourse with them. The word supplied the act element in criminal pleadings where precision of language was required to state a legally sufficient charge.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In a carnal manner.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): According to the flesh, to the world, or to human nature; in a manner to gratify animal appetites and lusts; sensually.
The common meaning carries broad moral and theological weight — appetite, worldliness, opposition to the spiritual. The legal meaning is far narrower: it refers specifically and almost exclusively to the physical act of sexual intercourse. A researcher encountering "carnally" in a legal document should not read it as a general moral descriptor. It is technical pleading language pointing to a specific act.
Common Confusion
"Carnally" is sometimes read as mere emphasis or moral coloring in older indictments, when it is in fact a term of art. Courts required its inclusion — or words of equivalent import — to allege the completed act of intercourse as distinct from lesser contact. Its absence from a charging instrument could, in some jurisdictions and periods, be fatal to the sufficiency of the indictment. Do not treat it as rhetorical filler.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical criminal records, indictment forms, or statutory construction materials will encounter "carnally" as a load-bearing word. Its function changed over time as legislatures moved away from common-law pleading formulas toward plain-language criminal codes. In modern statutes, "carnally" has been largely displaced by explicit definitions of "sexual intercourse," "penetration," or enumerated sexual acts. This means:
1. Temporal gap: A statute or indictment from the nineteenth or early twentieth century using "carnally knew" may carry different scope than a modern statute defining the same offense in anatomical terms. Historical cases construing "carnally" may not translate cleanly to modern statutory language.
2. Pleading traps: In historical sources, courts sometimes drew distinctions between "carnally knowing" (completed intercourse) and attempts or lesser acts. A case dismissed for defective indictment may have turned on the absence of this word.
3. Corpus connections: "Carnally" connects directly to CARNAL KNOWLEDGE as a substantive offense, to RAPE in its common-law elements, and to the statutory history of age-of-consent legislation, where the phrase "carnally know and abuse" was common formula. Researchers tracing the evolution of sexual offense law should track how legislatures replaced this adverb with more precise anatomical definitions and how courts interpreted that transition.
4. Equity and ecclesiastical records: The term also appears in ecclesiastical court materials and early equity proceedings involving marriage, annulment, and bastardy, where consummation of a marriage was at issue. Context determines whether the procedural or criminal frame governs.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not carry a direct entry for "carnally" in the supplied material; the excerpt provided covers unrelated Latin terms of art. This is consistent with the word's status as an adverb embedded in a longer legal phrase rather than a freestanding term of art warranting its own entry in standard legal dictionaries of the period. Bouvier's Law Dictionary (not in the supplied sources) and similar nineteenth-century references treat the substance under CARNAL KNOWLEDGE rather than defining the adverb independently. The practical implication for researchers is that historical legal dictionaries will rarely give you "carnally" as a headword — you must look to the noun phrase it qualifies.