Definition
A term of art in criminal pleading signifying that a man had sexual intercourse with a woman, used historically as the operative charging language in indictments for rape. An indictment charging rape was required — under earlier common law practice — to allege that the defendant "carnally knew and abused" the named victim, with "carnally knew" serving as the essential words establishing the act of penetration. The phrase derives from the biblical usage of "know" to denote sexual congress and was carried into formal legal pleading as a fixed formula.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Carnally" relates to the flesh or bodily appetites; "knew" in this construction follows archaic biblical usage in which "to know" a person means to have sexual intercourse with them.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Carnal" — "Pertaining to flesh; fleshly; sensual; opposed to spiritual; as, carnal pleasures." The verbal phrase "knew" in a sexual sense was recognized as scriptural in origin.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is not one of conflict but of register. Ordinary language treats "carnally knew" as archaic or biblical idiom. Legal usage transformed the phrase into a technical term of art with precise pleading consequences: the presence or absence of these exact words in an indictment could determine whether the charge was legally sufficient at common law. The common reader understands the phrase descriptively; the legal practitioner understood it operationally.
Common Confusion
"Carnally knew" is sometimes conflated with statutory rape language in modern sources. The historical phrase applies specifically to forcible rape at common law and requires proof of penetration. Statutory offenses involving minors — where consent is legally irrelevant — often use different charging language, and modern codes have largely replaced the phrase with defined terms such as "sexual intercourse," "sexual penetration," or "sexual contact." Researchers should not assume that the presence of "carnally knew" in a historical indictment signals a charge involving a minor; it is the general common law rape formula.
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a pleading term, not a substantive element defined in isolation. Its significance in the Law Mind corpus is almost entirely historical: researchers encountering it will do so in pre-20th-century indictments, appellate decisions reviewing indictment sufficiency, and common law criminal procedure treatises.
Several traps await the unwary researcher:
First, the requirement of these exact words was contested even within the common law tradition. Bouvier acknowledges that early English authorities treated "carnally knew" as indispensable, but that later commentary — including Chitty — expressed doubt, and the trend moved toward treating the words as sufficient but not uniquely necessary. Researchers reading older cases that quash an indictment for lacking "carnally knew" should not assume that rule survived uniformly into 19th-century American practice.
Second, American jurisdictions diverged on pleading formality earlier than English courts. State decisions interpreting local statutes often relaxed the strict common law formula, accepting equivalent language. A case from one American jurisdiction upholding an indictment that omits "carnally knew" does not overrule the common law rule in another jurisdiction.
Third, the phrase appears in the context of marital rape doctrine, sodomy indictments, and statutory rape cases from the same period — but it carried different legal weight in each context. Researchers should identify the precise charge before drawing conclusions about what "carnally knew" established in a given document.
Fourth, the phrase has essentially disappeared from modern American criminal codes. Any research connecting historical doctrine to current law requires tracing the legislative replacement language in the relevant jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core proposition: "carnally knew" is a technical pleading phrase used in rape indictments, and at common law it was treated as essential to the charge. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence state the rule without qualification. Bouvier is the most historically rich of the sources, citing Comyns's Digest, Hale's Pleas of the Crown, and Chitty's Criminal Law — a rare triangulation that reveals an internal debate within the common law tradition itself.
Bouvier's entry is incomplete as reproduced here (it ends mid-sentence: "the words 'carnally knew' are inc—"), but the thrust is clear: settled opinion moved toward treating the words as included and sufficient, even if not exclusively necessary. This evolution is significant. The strict early rule — that the absence of "carnally knew" was fatal to an indictment — softened over time as courts became more willing to accept functional equivalents.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the relationship between the pleading formula and the substantive proof required. None of the source entries explains what the phrase established at trial — specifically, that penetration (however slight) was the operative act, and that emission was not required. Researchers using these dictionary entries as their sole source will miss the substantive-law dimension that courts actually applied.
Jurisdictional Note
The common law rule requiring "carnally knew" was substantially displaced in American jurisdictions through statutory reform. Many 19th-century American states codified rape with their own charging language, and modern criminal codes uniformly define the offense in terms of specific acts rather than common law formulas. The phrase retains relevance in research into historical American and English cases but has no operative force in contemporary indictments.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Rape (Common Law Elements and Pleading); Criminal Pleading (Indictment Sufficiency)