Definition
A historical English court practice of formally entering a sentence of death on the official record with the understood intention that the sentence would never be pronounced. The entry on the record produced the same legal effect as if sentence had been pronounced aloud and the offender immediately reprieved — that is, the convicted person stood as one who had received and been spared from a capital sentence, with all the attendant legal consequences that followed from reprieve, without the sentence ever being spoken in open court.
The practice is universally described as disused.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Fitted with a cord; having the appearance of cords or furrows; of wood piled in cords.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Bound or fastened with cords; piled in a form for measurement by the cord; striped or ribbed with cords.
The common meaning of "corded" has no connection to the legal meaning. A researcher encountering the term in a historical legal document should not read it as a reference to binding or cordage of any kind. The legal usage is a term of art describing a procedural fiction in English criminal practice, drawing — if at all — on the image of something formally "bound into" or inscribed upon the record, though the connection is not made explicit in historical sources.
Common Confusion
Corded should not be confused with reprieve, pardon, or nolle prosequi, though its practical effect overlaps with reprieve. In a reprieve, sentence is pronounced and then execution is suspended. In the corded practice, the sentence is entered on the record but never pronounced — the legal fiction operates at an earlier stage. Researchers should also take care not to conflate this with benefit of clergy, a separate English criminal practice by which certain offenders avoided capital punishment through a different procedural mechanism.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a narrow artifact of pre-modern English criminal procedure and is unlikely to appear in American legal sources at any period. Researchers working in English criminal records, Year Books, or early common law materials should be alert to the term as a marker of a specific procedural moment: the gap between entry of judgment on the roll and oral pronouncement of sentence in court. That gap was legally significant in historical English practice, where the record was authoritative and oral pronouncement was a distinct act.
The practical consequence — that the offender was treated as reprieved — means that a corded sentence could affect questions of attainder, forfeiture, or the offender's subsequent legal status. A researcher tracing property forfeitures or civil disabilities following a capital conviction in historical English sources should consider whether a sentence described in the record was corded, since the legal effect on attainder and forfeiture may differ from a straightforwardly pronounced sentence.
No American jurisdiction is known to have adopted this practice. The term should be treated as inapplicable to American legal materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the sole source dictionary for this entry and provides the complete definition as it stands in the historical legal lexicon. Bouvier flags the practice as already disused at the time of his writing, which anchors it firmly as a historical curiosity rather than operative doctrine. No other standard American legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses this term, which is consistent with its purely English provenance and obsolete status.
The Bouvier entry does not explain the origin of the term, the period during which the practice was current, or the procedural mechanism by which the corded entry produced its legal effect. Researchers seeking deeper treatment will need to consult English criminal law histories and commentary on the rolls of the English courts beyond what Bouvier supplies.
Jurisdictional Note
This practice is specific to historical English courts and has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It should be treated as English legal history rather than as applicable doctrine in any modern or American research context.