Definition
To kneel is to bend the knees and rest upon them, or to assume a posture of genuflection. In legal contexts, the term has appeared almost exclusively in ecclesiastical law, where it carried technical significance in disputes over ritual practice within church proceedings and religious observances. Bouvier distinguishes kneeling from mere bending of the knees: to bend the knees in worship without resting on them is not, strictly speaking, to kneel.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To rest on one's bent knees, sometimes only one; to move to such a position.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To bend the knee; to fall or rest on the knees. Webster illustrates the term exclusively through religious and devotional contexts.
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but precise. In ordinary language, "kneel" encompasses any act of bending to or resting on the knees. In ecclesiastical legal usage, the distinction between bending the knees and fully resting upon them was not pedantic — it defined the boundaries of compliance with prescribed liturgical rubrics and bore directly on whether a communicant or clergyman had fulfilled or violated the ritual requirements at issue in church court proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will rarely encounter "kneel" as a standalone legal term. Its appearance in Bouvier traces to nineteenth-century English ecclesiastical case law, where disputes over ritual conformity — kneeling at communion, genuflection during prayer, and related practices — were litigated before ecclesiastical courts under the Act of Uniformity and related rubrics of the Church of England. The citation in Bouvier (36 L.J. Ecc. 10) points to the Law Journal Ecclesiastical series, a source not universally indexed in American legal databases.
For corpus researchers, several traps apply. First, the term surfaces in a very specific doctrinal pocket — Anglican ritual conformity litigation — and has essentially no purchase in American civil or criminal law. Searching for "kneel" in American legal databases will return noise (incidental factual description in assault, excessive force, or civil rights cases) rather than the doctrinal usage Bouvier records. Second, the Bouvier definition derives from English ecclesiastical authority, and Bouvier himself does not elaborate a broader American legal doctrine around the term. Third, as ecclesiastical courts in the English sense have no American counterpart, the legal significance of the precise physical distinction (bending versus resting) has not migrated into American jurisprudence.
If a researcher is tracing the term in its proper home — nineteenth-century English ecclesiastical litigation over ritual practice — the relevant corpus is the English Law Journal Ecclesiastical Reports and the broader literature on the ritualist controversies of the 1860s–1880s, including proceedings under the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier is the only source on the Law Mind shelf that defines this term, and his entry is exceptionally brief: it offers a single-sentence definition sourced to an English ecclesiastical reporter. No American legal dictionary in the standard canon develops the term further. Black's Law Dictionary (various editions) does not carry an independent entry for "kneel."
Bouvier's reliance on English ecclesiastical authority reflects the reality that this term's legal life was almost entirely a product of Anglican rubric disputes. The definition he records — distinguishing incomplete genuflection from full kneeling — echoes the kind of hyper-precise liturgical analysis that characterized English church court opinions during the ritualist controversies. For the purposes of American legal research, Bouvier's entry is a pointer to a foreign ecclesiastical tradition rather than a foundation for domestic doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
In American law, "kneel" carries no recognized doctrinal significance. Contemporary appearances in American case law are purely factual (e.g., descriptions of physical acts in use-of-force or civil rights litigation) and do not invoke any specialized legal definition. The Bouvier definition is operative only in the English ecclesiastical law context from which it derives.