Definition
Pec is an abbreviated or clipped form of PAX ECCLESIÆ (L. Lat.: "peace of the church"), a term from old English law denoting two related but distinct privileges attached to a church or ecclesiastical space:
1. The general peace of the church — a protected status extending to church grounds, corresponding to the broader concept of the "Peace of God and the Church," under which violence committed within or against sacred spaces carried special legal and spiritual consequences.
2. Sanctuary — the specific privilege by which a church or consecrated space afforded protection to a person who fled there, temporarily shielding that individual from secular arrest or physical molestation. This was a recognized legal immunity, not merely a religious custom, enforceable within the structure of medieval English law.
The entry in Burrill under this heading bridges two cross-referenced concepts: pax (peace, in its legal sense of freedom from molestation) and the ecclesial privilege of sanctuary. The abbreviation "Pec" appears as a heading device in Burrill's arrangement rather than as a term of art independently used in legal instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Pec" in modern English refers informally to the pectoralis major muscle, or is a clipping of "pectoral sandpiper" (a bird species). It carries no legal or institutional connotation in ordinary speech.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined as a legal term.
Editorial note: The gap here is total. The modern common use of "pec" is anatomical slang with no relationship to its historical legal appearance. A researcher encountering "Pec" in a historical legal index or dictionary heading should not assume any connection to the modern colloquial term. It is an indexing abbreviation for a Latin ecclesiastical concept, not a standalone English legal word.
Common Confusion
"Pec" as it appears in Burrill is easily confused with or passed over as a typographical fragment, a personal name abbreviation, or an error. It is neither. It functions as a compressed heading for PAX ECCLESIÆ. Researchers should also take care to distinguish pax ecclesiæ (peace of the church, with its sanctuary dimension) from pax regis (the king's peace), which was a secular protective concept with separate doctrinal development and different legal consequences for breach.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry is primarily a navigational artifact in historical legal research. "Pec" will not appear in case reports, statutes, or pleadings as a standalone term — its significance is as an index or dictionary heading pointing toward PAX ECCLESIÆ and the law of sanctuary.
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal history should treat this entry as a pointer term. The substantive research value lies in the two doctrines it abbreviates: (1) the ecclesiastical peace, which intersected with royal peace in ways that generated jurisdictional disputes between church and crown throughout the medieval period, and (2) sanctuary, which had a rich and evolving legal history before its formal abolition in England.
Sanctuary as a legal privilege was progressively curtailed by statute beginning in the Tudor period and was largely eliminated for felonies by the early seventeenth century. Researchers examining pre-abolition sources will find the concept treated as a live legal question; post-abolition sources treat it as historical. Burrill's entry, by cross-referencing Fleta and Blackstone's Commentaries alongside Crabb's History, signals that the concept spans both the medieval common law period and its antiquarian treatment by later commentators.
Fleta (cited in the related pax entry at lib. 2, c. 51) is a late thirteenth-century legal treatise; its treatment of peace privileges predates the statutory erosion of sanctuary. Blackstone's discussion (1 Bl. Com. 165) addresses legislative privilege under the heading of pax — a distinct application of the same root concept to parliamentary immunity. A researcher who follows only one of these cross-references will miss the doctrinal breadth Burrill is gesturing at.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's treatment of "Pec" is compressed and functions primarily as a cross-reference hub. The entry itself does not define; it directs. The substantive content is distributed across the related entries for PAX, PAX ECCLESIÆ, and the sanctuary discussion. Burrill cites Fleta for the freedom-from-molestation dimension and Crabb's History of English Law alongside Cowell's legal dictionary for the sanctuary/privilege dimension.
Cowell's Interpreter (early seventeenth century) and Crabb's History represent the antiquarian and historical commentary tradition rather than active legal doctrine, which is consistent with the status of sanctuary as a largely abolished privilege by the time major English legal dictionaries were compiled. The absence of extended treatment in Burrill reflects this: by the nineteenth century, pax ecclesiæ and its sanctuary dimension were historical curiosities rather than operative legal concepts.
No significant divergence exists among historical sources on the core meaning — there is simply variation in how much doctrinal weight each commentator assigns to the concept depending on the period addressed.
Jurisdictional Note
Pax ecclesiæ and sanctuary as legal privileges were features of English ecclesiastical and common law and do not have direct counterparts in American law. Some state constitutions and early American legal commentary reference sanctuary in a religious or moral sense, but the operative legal doctrine did not transplant to the American system. Researchers should treat this term as England-specific and period-specific.