Definition
In historical English law, a faggot was a badge of public penance worn by persons who had recanted heretical beliefs and formally submitted to ecclesiastical authority. The term refers both to the physical emblem sewn onto a penitent's garment and to the act of public humiliation it represented.
The badge took the form of a faggot — a bundle of sticks — stitched onto the sleeve of the wearer's outer garment. The symbol was deliberately chosen: it represented the fire that the penitent had narrowly escaped by recanting before condemnation and execution. Wearing the faggot was a continuing mark of infamy imposed by ecclesiastical courts, signifying that the person had been adjudged a heretic but had been spared burning at the stake in exchange for public abjuration.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A bundle of sticks or brushwood tied together for use as fuel; also a bundle of iron or steel rods; a type of meatball made from offcuts and offal.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees, used for fuel, fascines, or other purposes.
The legal meaning is a direct extension of the common meaning, but the two are not interchangeable without context. In the legal-ecclesiastical sense, the faggot is symbolic rather than functional — it represents the instrument of execution the penitent avoided, worn as a perpetual reminder and public mark of disgrace. A researcher encountering "faggot" in historical ecclesiastical or legal records should not read it as a reference to fuel or material goods.
Common Confusion
The term is encountered primarily in records of ecclesiastical proceedings and heresy trials under medieval and early modern English law. It should not be confused with the faggot as a unit of measurement (a defined bundle of a specific number of sticks used in trade) or with "faggot vote," a distinct electoral law term referring to the fraudulent creation of property qualifications to manufacture votes. These are separate uses with no legal relationship to the ecclesiastical badge.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in ecclesiastical records, heresy proceedings, or the history of English religious courts will encounter this term in a narrow but consequential context. Several navigational points apply.
First, the term appears almost exclusively in sources predating the English Reformation's dismantling of ecclesiastical heresy jurisdiction, which means it is most relevant in records from roughly the thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries. After the Reformation, the formal machinery of heresy abjuration under Catholic ecclesiastical authority collapsed, and the term loses its precise legal-ecclesiastical meaning.
Second, Bouvier provides the more complete procedural picture: the faggot was not merely a one-time penance but a permanent mark of infamy embroidered on the sleeve of the upper garment. This distinction matters when reading records that distinguish between those who "carried the faggot" in a one-time public procession and those condemned to wear it indefinitely.
Third, the term may appear in indexes and finding aids alongside "abjuration," "heresy," "recantation," and "penance" — researchers should run cross-searches on all of these when tracing individuals through ecclesiastical court records.
Fourth, do not confuse occurrences of this term in English property or electoral law records with the ecclesiastical meaning. The "faggot voter" problem in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parliamentary records is an entirely different legal context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st Ed.) and Bouvier agree on the core definition — a badge worn by recanted heretics — and both cite Cowell's Interpreter as the authority, indicating the term was well settled in legal lexicography by the time these dictionaries were compiled. Bouvier adds meaningful procedural detail that Black's omits: the distinction between carrying a faggot as immediate penance and wearing the embroidered badge as a lasting mark of infamy.
Black's (2nd Ed.) does not carry a standalone entry for this term; the source material supplied from that edition appears to be adjacent content from unrelated entries (Facultas, Faculties), suggesting the term was dropped or merged in revision. This is itself informative: by the late nineteenth century, the term had sufficiently fallen out of active legal use that editors did not consider it worth retaining in revised editions.
Neither Black's nor Bouvier addresses the procedural mechanism by which ecclesiastical courts imposed this sanction, the conditions under which the badge could be removed, or the consequences of being caught without the badge once condemned to wear it. Researchers needing that level of detail should consult primary ecclesiastical records and specialized histories of heresy proceedings rather than these dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English ecclesiastical law under Catholic jurisdiction and has no meaningful American legal counterpart. It does not appear in American legal sources. Researchers working in colonial American ecclesiastical or religious court records are unlikely to encounter it in this technical sense.