Definition
Malesworn (also spelled malsworn) is an archaic legal term meaning forsworn — that is, having taken a false oath or having violated an oath already sworn. A person described as malesworn has committed perjury in the sense of oath-breaking, whether by swearing falsely at the outset or by acting contrary to a solemn sworn obligation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general use. The term is archaic and appears only in historical or specialized contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had already passed out of common English use by the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: Because the term has no living common-language counterpart, the legal meaning cannot be measured against a modern lay understanding. Researchers encountering malesworn in historical sources should treat it as a technical term of art equivalent to "forsworn" or "perjured," not as a word with an accessible plain-English double.
Common Confusion
Malesworn is sometimes read as a variant of "malsworn" without recognizing that both spellings refer to the same concept. Neither spelling should be confused with the broader modern offense of perjury, which carries specific statutory elements. Malesworn describes the status or character of a person who has broken an oath; it does not map precisely onto any modern criminal charge. It is also distinct from subornation of perjury, which involves inducing another to swear falsely.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: Historical evolution — a term that has entirely left active legal use and survives only in historical sources and glossaries.
Researchers will encounter malesworn almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records, pleadings, and treatises. Several research traps apply:
Spelling instability is significant. Historical manuscripts render this term as malesworn, malsworn, malsworne, and occasionally in Latin-adjacent corruptions. Corpus searches limited to a single spelling will miss occurrences.
The term signals oath-based legal culture. Its appearance in a document is itself informative: malesworn presupposes a legal or ecclesiastical framework in which oath-taking carried enforceable weight and in which oath-breaking was a distinct wrong, sometimes cognizable in church courts rather than royal courts. Researchers should consider whether the source document is secular or ecclesiastical before inferring jurisdictional context.
Cowell's Interpreter is the authority Black's traces this to, meaning the term's presence in later legal dictionaries is derivative rather than independently verified through case law or statute. Researchers should not assume malesworn had operational meaning in pleading or indictment practice beyond Cowell's period; it may function in later sources as a learned gloss rather than a living term.
Connection to perjury history: Researchers tracing the development of perjury as a common law and statutory offense will find malesworn useful as a marker of the pre-statutory conceptual landscape, when oath-breaking was understood morally and ecclesiastically before being codified as a discrete criminal offense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary transmits this term from John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), one of the foundational English legal glossaries. Black's entry is minimal — little more than a transliteration of Cowell's definition — and provides no case authority or statutory grounding.
Cowell himself defined malesworn through the Anglo-Norman and Middle English tradition, where the male- prefix (from Old French mal-, meaning badly or wrongly) combined with sworn to produce a compound meaning one who has sworn wrongly or falsely. The term is functional rather than technical in Cowell: a descriptive label applied to a person, not a cause of action.
What historical dictionaries miss: Neither Black's nor the sources it draws on here situate malesworn within a procedural context — there is no guidance on how the term was used in pleading, what remedy attached, or which court held jurisdiction. This gap is characteristic of glossary-style legal lexicography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which catalogued words without always capturing their procedural life. Researchers should not infer that a term's presence in Cowell establishes its currency in contemporaneous practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Malesworn is a term of English legal history. It does not appear as a term of art in Scots, Irish, or American legal traditions, and has no counterpart in civilian or canon law vocabulary recognizable by that name. Researchers working in non-English common law jurisdictions should look for local equivalents in oath-breaking doctrine rather than expecting to find this term in non-English sources.