Definition
A Latin term from old English law with two related but distinct senses:
1. Corruption generally: The violation, defilement, or tainting of a legal status or condition. Used in medieval legal texts to describe a fundamental impairment of a person's legal standing.
2. Corruptio sanguinis (corruption of blood): The legal consequence by which a person attainted of treason or felony was deemed civilly dead, incapable of inheriting land from an ancestor, holding property, or transmitting inheritance to heirs. The taint ran both upward and downward through the bloodline, severing the attainted person from the ordinary legal incidents of family succession.
The term appears in Fleta, a thirteenth-century English legal treatise, as a technical descriptor for this defilement of legal personhood.
Common Confusion
Corruptio is sometimes read as a direct ancestor of the modern English word "corruption" in its public-integrity sense — bribery, abuse of office, venality. That reading is anachronistic in most historical legal contexts. When encountered in old English and medieval Latin legal sources, corruptio almost always refers to the civil disability of attainder and its bloodline consequences, not to official misconduct. A researcher finding the term in a pre-nineteenth-century legal text should resist importing the modern anti-corruption meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research value of this term is identifying and interpreting passages in early English law sources where corruptio appears without elaboration. Several cautions apply:
First, Fleta (the source Burrill cites) is a late-thirteenth-century treatise of uncertain authorship, modeled on Bracton. Passages in Fleta citing corruptio reflect Plantagenet-era doctrine and should not be read forward into later periods without attention to how attainder doctrine evolved through the Tudor and Stuart periods.
Second, corruption of blood as an institution was formally abolished in the United States. The U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3, limits the consequences of attainder of treason, specifying that corruption of blood shall not extend beyond the life of the person attainted. American states subsequently abolished the doctrine by statute or constitutional provision. Kent's Commentaries (the "2 Kent's Com. 386" reference Burrill supplies) provides a concise treatment of this abolition and is the natural starting point for tracing American reception and rejection of the doctrine.
Third, the term is largely absent from post-nineteenth-century American legal writing as a technical term of art. If it appears in a modern source, it is almost certainly being used in a historical or comparative context, or the writer is quoting or paraphrasing an older authority.
Fourth, researchers working in English legal history should be alert to the distinction between corruption of blood as a consequence of attainder by act of Parliament versus attainder by judgment of a court. The procedural context affects the scope and reversibility of the corruptio.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise. It correctly anchors the term in old English law, cites Fleta for the defilement-of-person sense, and then pivots immediately to the American abolitionist position via Kent. This structure reflects the practical orientation of nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries: acknowledge the English pedigree, confirm the American departure.
What Burrill does not supply — and what a researcher should seek elsewhere — is any treatment of the procedural mechanics by which corruptio operated or was reversed. Parliamentary bills of attainder could be reversed by subsequent legislation; judicial attainders had their own reversal procedures. That complexity is beyond the scope of a dictionary entry but is essential context for anyone working with primary sources in which corruptio appears as a live legal issue rather than a historical artifact.
Earlier common-law commentators, including Coke and Blackstone, address corruption of blood with considerably more granularity than Burrill. Blackstone's Commentaries, Book IV, provides the fullest accessible treatment of attainder and its incidents, including corruptio sanguinis, in the English tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Corruption of blood as a civil consequence of criminal conviction is constitutionally curtailed in the United States and has been abolished by state law across American jurisdictions. The doctrine remains relevant in U.S. legal research only in historical, colonial-era, or comparative law contexts. English law abolished corruption of blood by statute in the nineteenth century (Forfeiture Act 1870 and predecessor legislation).
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Attainder and Corruption of Blood