Definition
An archaic Anglo-Norman legal term (Law French) denoting high treason — that is, an offense committed against the sovereign power of the state or the person of the monarch. The term derives from the Roman law concept of majestas (the majesty or supreme authority of the Roman people and, later, the emperor), which treated crimes against the sovereign as the gravest category of public offense. In early English legal usage, majestie referred specifically to treasonable conduct directed at the crown, functioning as a shorthand for what later statutes and common law would elaborate as high treason.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An archaic spelling of "majesty," meaning greatness, grandeur, or the title of address for a monarch.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Majesty denotes the dignity, grandeur, or authority of a sovereign; also used as a form of address ("His Majesty," "Her Majesty").
The gap between common and legal usage here is historically significant. In ordinary language, "majesty" denotes the dignity and title of a sovereign. In the legal register from which majestie derives, the word does not describe the monarch but rather describes offenses against the monarch — a crime, not a quality. A reader encountering majestie in an early legal text who supplies the common meaning (sovereign grandeur) will entirely miss the juridical content (treasonous violation of sovereign authority).
Common Confusion
Majestie is sometimes read by modern researchers as simply an archaic spelling of "majesty" used in a reverential or descriptive sense. This misreading collapses an important distinction. In the legal sources where the term appears — particularly the Mirror of Justices and works drawing on Romano-canonical tradition — majestie is a term of art for a category of crime, closely parallel to the Roman crimen laesae majestatis (crime of injured or violated majesty). It is the violation of majesty that is named, not the majesty itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal history will encounter majestie almost exclusively in the Mirror of Justices and in secondary treatments of that text, including Crabb's History of English Law and Reeves' History of the English Law. These are the primary corpus sites for the term.
Several navigational traps exist:
First, the term is Law French in form but Roman in conceptual origin. Researchers should not assume that its meaning tracks ordinary French or Anglo-Norman usage of the period. The majestas framework from Roman law was consciously imported into the Mirror's categorization of serious offenses, giving the term a technical charge it would not carry in non-legal contexts.
Second, the Mirror of Justices is a notoriously unreliable source. Legal historians have long treated it with caution as a record of actual medieval English law, and Burrill's reference to it should be read accordingly. Majestie may reflect the Mirror's author's civilian learning more than settled common law doctrine.
Third, the term itself did not survive into mainstream English common law vocabulary. The Treason Act of 1351 (25 Edw. III st. 5 c. 2) systematized high treason without using the Roman terminology, and subsequent legal writers — Coke, Hale, Blackstone — did not employ majestie as a term of art. A researcher tracing the law of treason through the standard common law corpus will find no continuity from majestie as a label, even though the underlying concept (crimes against sovereign authority) persisted and expanded.
Fourth, the term's Roman pedigree makes it relevant to comparative and civilian legal research. Crimen laesae majestatis is the proper parallel term in civil law systems, and researchers working across common law and civil law sources should treat majestie as the bridge concept connecting the two traditions in early English materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source to treat majestie as a discrete entry. Burrill identifies it as Law French, glosses it as "majesty, or high treason," situates it in the Mirror, and traces it to the Roman majestas through two secondary references: Crabb's History of English Law (p. 302) and Reeves' History of the English Law (2nd volume, p. 349). This is a compact but accurate treatment.
What Burrill does not address is the contested reliability of the Mirror as a legal authority, the absence of majestie from mainstream common law treason doctrine after the fourteenth century, or the full civilian genealogy of the concept. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as an accurate pointer to source material but not as a complete account of the term's significance or limitations.
No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Bouvier, not Black's — carries a dedicated entry for majestie, which underscores both the term's archaic character and its narrow corpus footprint.
Jurisdictional Note
Majestie has no modern jurisdictional application in any common law system. It is exclusively a term of historical English law found in early medieval legal sources. Researchers in comparative law contexts should look to crimen laesae majestatis for the parallel civilian tradition, which survived in continental European legal systems considerably longer.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: High Treason; Sovereignty and the Crown; Mirror of Justices (if available); Roman Influences on English Law.