Definition
An archaic Latin term used in old English law meaning contempt or contempts — that is, acts of disobedience, disrespect, or defiance directed against a court, a sovereign authority, or a legal command. The term appears in medieval and early common law texts as the formal designation for conduct that obstructs or dishonors the administration of justice or the exercise of lawful authority. It is the direct Latin ancestor of the modern English legal concept of contempt, and it carried both the sense of a specific act of defiance and, in the plural (contemptus), a category of such offenses treated collectively.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Year Books, or Latin-language treatises will encounter contemptus as the operative term where modern sources would say "contempt." The shift from Latin to English legal vocabulary occurred gradually over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so the transition between contemptus and "contempt" is not a clean historical break — both forms may appear in sources from the same period.
The primary navigational challenge is that contemptus in historical sources encompasses a broader and less procedurally refined category than the modern doctrine of contempt of court. Medieval usage did not sharply distinguish between what modern law separates into civil contempt, criminal contempt, direct contempt, and indirect contempt. A researcher finding contemptus in a Fleta citation or similar source should not assume the procedural machinery of modern contempt doctrine applies.
Burrill's reference to Fleta, lib. 2, c. 60, § 35 is the anchor citation for this term in the English legal tradition. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise modeled on Bracton, and its usage of contemptus reflects the broad feudal-era understanding of contemptuous conduct — including disobedience to royal writs and failure to appear before courts — rather than anything resembling the modern procedurally structured contempt sanction. Researchers using Fleta should treat contemptus as a descriptive category, not as a term with the technical precision it would later acquire.
Because the term is Latin and tied to a specific stratum of legal history, it will appear almost exclusively in primary sources predating the full anglicization of legal pleading and treatise writing. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law. When tracing the intellectual genealogy of contempt doctrine, contemptus is the starting point, not a term with ongoing doctrinal life.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a bare identification of the term as Latin, a translation ("contempt; contempts"), a jurisdictional tag ("old English law"), and a single citation to Fleta. This reflects the standard treatment of Latin terms in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries: they are catalogued for identification purposes, not analyzed for doctrinal content.
Burrill does not attempt to define the legal scope of contemptus beyond the gloss, which is appropriate given that the term's content was entirely absorbed into the developed English doctrine of contempt long before Burrill was writing. The plural form contemptus (which is identical in Latin to the singular nominative but functions as a genitive or accusative plural depending on context) is noted without grammatical elaboration, which is consistent with how Latin legal terms were treated in common law dictionaries of the era.
No other source in the historical dictionary shelf addresses contemptus directly. Its doctrinal substance is subsumed in entries on contempt across later dictionaries, where the Latin root is acknowledged but the analysis proceeds entirely in English legal terms.
Jurisdictional Note
Contemptus as a term of art is confined to English legal history and to texts within the English common law tradition that preserved Latin legal vocabulary. It does not appear as a live term in any modern common law jurisdiction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See CONTEMPT OF COURT for the developed doctrine that descends from this term.