Definition
Malsworn means forsworn — that is, having taken a false oath or having violated an oath already sworn. The term describes a person who has committed perjury or sworn falsely, whether in judicial proceedings or in any other context requiring an oath. It is an archaic legal and literary descriptor rather than a term of operative legal art: it characterizes the status or condition of one who has broken the bond of a sworn oath, rendering their word and testimony suspect.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general use; effectively obsolete in modern English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; the concept was carried by the verb "forswear" — to renounce or deny under oath, or to swear falsely.
The gap here is one of register rather than meaning. The legal and common senses of the underlying concept (false swearing) are essentially the same, but the word "malsworn" itself belongs almost entirely to the legal and quasi-legal vocabulary of medieval and early modern England. A modern reader encountering it in a historical document would not recognize it without reference to a legal dictionary, even though the concept it describes — perjury — is immediately familiar.
Common Confusion
Malsworn and perjury are not precisely equivalent, though they overlap substantially. Perjury in its developed common law form required a false statement made under oath in a judicial proceeding, with materiality and willfulness as necessary elements. Malsworn carried no such technical structure: it was a descriptive label applied to any person regarded as having sworn falsely, in or out of court. The term also invites confusion with "forsworn," which is its direct synonym in older sources and which appears more frequently in both legal and literary texts of the same period. Researchers should not assume that a person described as malsworn in a historical record was necessarily subject to a formal perjury proceeding.
Why It Matters in Research
Malsworn is a term a researcher is far more likely to encounter than to search for. It surfaces in medieval plea rolls, ecclesiastical court records, and early common law commentaries as a characterization of a witness or party rather than as a formal charge or cause of action. Because it does not map onto any modern legal category with the same label, full-text searches using the term will miss most relevant modern doctrine; researchers should pivot immediately to perjury, false swearing, and oath-breaking when tracing the underlying concept forward in time.
The term's rarity in later sources also means that when it does appear — in a transcribed court record, a glossary of an early treatise, or an antiquarian legal text — it is functioning as a deliberate archaism, signaling that the author is drawing on very old authority or is writing in a context (ecclesiastical, manorial, or customary law) where older vocabulary persisted longer than in the royal courts. Cowell's Interpreter, cited as the authority in Black's, is itself a seventeenth-century legal glossary that preserved many terms of this kind that had already passed out of active judicial use.
Researchers working in ecclesiastical court records should be alert to the fact that false swearing carried distinct consequences in canon law — compurgation, excommunication, and spiritual censure — that had no direct common law parallel. Malsworn in an ecclesiastical context may therefore implicate a different procedural and remedial framework than the same word in a secular court record.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the entirety of the available historical dictionary support: the entry reads, in full, "Mal-sworn, or malsworn. Forsworn. Cowell." The brevity is itself informative. The entry does nothing more than define the word by synonym and attribute it to John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), a comprehensive glossary of legal terms compiled during the reign of James I. Black's is functioning here as a relay rather than an independent authority — it preserves Cowell's definition without elaboration.
No other major historical law dictionary in the standard legal research corpus gives the term independent treatment. Its absence from later editions of Black's and from Bouvier's Law Dictionary confirms that the term had no continuing life in American or modern English law. It is, in the fullest sense, a dictionary fossil: preserved because it appeared in Cowell, relayed by Black's, and otherwise without active legal use after the early modern period.
Jurisdictional Note
Malsworn is a term of English legal history with no independent presence in American, Scottish, or Commonwealth legal vocabulary. Researchers working in American jurisdictions will not encounter it outside of historical or comparative contexts.