Definition
A ritualized phrase spoken by a criminal defendant at arraignment in response to the court's question, "How will you be tried?" The answer — "By God and my country" — signified the defendant's submission to trial by jury. The phrase is a survival of medieval English criminal procedure and persists in common law arraignment practice as a formal declaration, though it has long since lost any operative significance as an actual election of trial mode.
Common Confusion
This phrase is occasionally confused with a general invocation of religious sentiment or a sworn oath formula. It is neither. It is a procedural declaration, not an oath, and its theological component refers specifically to the mode of trial by ordeal — a practice long abolished — not to any ongoing appeal to divine authority. The "God" in the phrase has no operative legal content surviving into modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical court records, treatises, or procedural forms should understand it as a fossilized procedural remnant, not a live election. Its presence in a record tells you almost nothing about the defendant's actual choices by the time the phrase was standardized — it simply confirms that a plea was entered and the defendant was submitted to jury trial.
The critical research trap: both Black's editions and Bouvier flag the probability that the original form was "By God *or* my country," not "and." That single word shift — *or* to *and* — marks the entire collapse of the defendant's right to choose between ordeal and jury. A document using "or" may therefore predate or reflect an earlier phase of procedure than one using "and." When working with medieval or early modern sources, the conjunction is a meaningful signal.
The phrase also connects to the broader disappearance of trial by ordeal from English law, which occurred substantially after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 withdrew ecclesiastical support for the practice. Researchers studying the transition from ordeal to jury trial will find this phrase sitting directly at that procedural fault line. The country (*patria*) reference connects to the concept of the jury as the defendant's neighbors — the *pais* — a link important for understanding early jury theory and the concept of trial by peers.
In corpus research, this phrase appears in arraignment forms, procedural manuals, and early criminal law digests. It is unlikely to generate false positives, but researchers should note it may appear in discussions of ordeal, jury trial history, arraignment procedure, and pleas simultaneously, making it a useful pivot term across those clusters.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core explanation: the phrase answered the question "How will you be tried?" and originally reflected a genuine election between ordeal (by God) and jury (by the country). Both Black's editions present nearly identical text, suggesting stable transmission of the entry across printings. Bouvier adds the procedural framing slightly more expansively, noting that the question itself "supposes an option in the" defendant — a point that both Black's entries confirm by observing the original form was probably "by God *or* my country."
None of the historical sources trace the phrase forward into modern practice, and none flag that by their own time of publication the phrase was purely ceremonial. Researchers should not assume from the historical dictionaries' descriptive tone that the election remained live — it had not been a real choice for centuries by the time any of these dictionaries were compiled.
What the historical sources miss: they do not address how jurisdictions handled defendants who refused to answer or who answered differently, nor do they note that the phrase gradually disappeared from American practice as arraignment procedure modernized. The silence on American divergence is notable; researchers working in U.S. jurisdictions should not assume this ceremonial form persisted uniformly across colonial and post-colonial courts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Trial by Ordeal; Arraignment; Trial by Jury (Historical Development)