Definition
An archaic term from old English law meaning perjured or forsworn — specifically, one who has sworn a false oath with hand placed on a book. The act of swearing upon a physical object (the hand, or "main," pressed to a Bible or similar text) was the formal gesture of oath-taking, and to be mainsworn was to have violated that oath through deliberate falsehood. The term was used primarily in the north of England and survives only in historical legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Past participle of "mainswear" — to swear falsely; to perjure oneself.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not attested as a standalone entry in Webster's 1913.
The common and legal meanings here are unusually aligned: both simply denote the state of having sworn falsely. The legal interest lies not in a gap between common and legal usage, but in the term's geographical and temporal narrowness — it was a regionalism of northern England rather than a term of general English law, and it has no functional modern legal heir beyond the general concept of perjury.
Common Confusion
MAINSWORN should not be confused with MAINTENANCE, though they appear in close proximity in several historical dictionaries due to alphabetical sequencing. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry slides immediately from mainsworn into definitions of "maintain" and related terms, a layout that can mislead a researcher scanning the page. The two concepts are wholly unrelated: maintenance concerns improperly supporting another party's litigation; mainsworn concerns false swearing by a party or witness.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively a dead letter in modern legal practice and appears almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century English legal sources. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
Old English pleading records and northern English court documents, where regional dialect terms were more likely to appear in formal legal writing than in London-based common law courts.
Historical perjury and oath-related materials. Mainsworn captures an era when the physical act of oath-taking — hand on book — had distinct legal and moral weight. Understanding the term illuminates how perjury was conceptualized before modern statutory frameworks stripped away the ceremonial scaffolding.
Adjacency traps in historical dictionaries. As noted above, Rapalje & Lawrence embeds mainsworn immediately before a long string of "maintain" definitions. A researcher unfamiliar with the term could easily skip past it or misattribute its meaning to the maintenance cluster that follows.
The citations Brownl. 4 and Hob. 125, shared across Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's, refer to Brownlow's Reports and Hobart's Reports respectively — both early seventeenth-century English reporters. These are the only known primary sources anchoring the term's legal usage, and their recurrence across dictionaries suggests later compilers were drawing from a common ancestor rather than independent verification.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in near-complete agreement on this term, which is itself telling: Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's reproduce nearly identical language, citing the same two reporters. Burrill's adds the small clarification that "main" means hand (from the French), grounding the term's meaning in its etymology and confirming it as a compound of oath-taking gesture plus the act of betrayal. Rapalje & Lawrence provides the least useful entry, offering only a fragment before veering into the unrelated "maintain" cluster.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: any procedural consequences of being mainsworn, how it was proved or alleged, or whether it functioned as a formal legal status versus a descriptive label. Given that the supporting cases are from the early 1600s, it is likely the term had already fallen into disuse by the time the major dictionaries were compiled, and the compilers were recording a historical curiosity rather than an operative legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
Mainsworn was geographically confined to northern England and does not appear to have had a parallel term or doctrine in Scots law, Welsh law, or American colonial practice. It has no presence in American legal dictionaries beyond inherited English sources.