Definition
Men of straw were professional false witnesses who loitered around courts of law in former times, available for hire by attorneys or parties who needed a witness to testify to facts the witness did not personally know. They signaled their availability and trade by wearing a straw in one of their shoes — hence the alternate name "straw-shoes." When an advocate needed a convenient witness, he approached one of these men and opened with the prompt "Don't you remember?" — to which the man of straw understood his role and his price. The term survives as a historical descriptor for a class of legal practice now recognized as perjury and subornation of perjury.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "man of straw" — a person of no substance or reliability, or a fabricated opponent set up to be easily defeated (a straw man argument).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A "man of straw" was a person of no financial substance or credibility; one who could not be held accountable because he had nothing to lose.
The common meanings — insubstantiality, fabrication, weakness — are related to the legal meaning but do not capture it precisely. In the legal context, the term does not describe an imaginary person or a rhetorical device, but rather a real, flesh-and-blood individual who sold false testimony as a trade. The legal meaning carries a specific, organized, commercial dimension of corruption that the rhetorical and financial senses lack.
Common Confusion
"Man of straw" in legal research can surface in two distinct contexts that researchers sometimes conflate. First, its historical legal meaning: the hireable false witness described here. Second, its broader figurative meaning in property and commercial law contexts, where "man of straw" or "straw man" describes a nominal party — a person who holds title or acts in a transaction on behalf of another, without real interest, to conceal the true principal. These are related by metaphor but functionally different: one is a corrupt witness, the other is a nominee or intermediary. Modern legal usage has almost entirely shifted to the nominee/intermediary sense, while the false-witness sense is extinct as a living practice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a period artifact. Researchers encountering "men of straw" in historical legal sources — treatises, court records, or commentaries predating roughly the mid-nineteenth century — should read it in its false-witness sense. The commercial trade in perjured testimony that men of straw represented was a recognized feature of English legal practice, not a marginal scandal, and historical legal commentary references it with a matter-of-factness that may surprise modern readers.
The primary research trap is anachronistic reading: a researcher familiar only with the modern "straw man" (nominee) usage may misread historical sources that invoke men of straw in the false-witness sense, producing incorrect analysis of historical procedural or evidentiary discussions.
A secondary trap involves the 2nd Edition of Black's, where the men of straw entry appears in sequence following a discussion of legal memory periods and statutory reform — a pagination artifact of how older dictionaries were set, not a substantive connection between the concepts. Researchers using the 2nd Edition should be alert to this layout.
The historical false-witness trade also connects to the broader reform of English evidence law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statutory oath reforms, the extension of competency to interested witnesses, and eventually the Evidence Act 1851 and similar reforms addressed the conditions that made hireable witnesses a market proposition. Research into perjury, witness competency, or evidentiary reform may encounter men of straw as background context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st Ed.) and Bouvier's are substantially identical on this entry, reproducing the same core description of the straw-in-the-shoe signal and the "Don't you remember?" colloquy. This convergence suggests a shared source — likely a common English legal commentary — rather than independent research. Both dictionaries treat the practice as historical even at the time of their writing, using the past tense throughout.
Black's (2nd Ed.) adds no substantive new information on the men of straw entry itself; the surrounding text about legal memory periods is a separate entry that happens to appear on the same page in that edition's formatting.
None of the three historical dictionaries address the later, separate development of "straw man" as a nominee concept, which had emerged in property and commercial contexts by the time these dictionaries were published. This is a significant gap for any researcher attempting to trace the full semantic history of the straw-man concept across both its false-witness and nominee branches.
Jurisdictional Note
The false-witness sense of men of straw was an English legal phenomenon and appears primarily in sources rooted in English common law practice. American legal sources inherited the terminology through reception of English law but the specific court-loitering trade does not appear to have been documented as an organized practice in American courts in the same way.