Definition
Per corpus is a Latin phrase meaning "by the body." In old English law, it carried two distinct procedural meanings:
1. By the body (trial): A reference to trial by combat — the wager of battel or duellum — as the mode of proof or resolution in a legal dispute. In this sense, per corpus was contrasted with per patriam, meaning "by the country" (i.e., by jury). A party proceeding per corpus staked the outcome on physical combat rather than the verdict of fellow subjects.
2. By the body (process): A reference to enforcement by bodily seizure — that is, taking a person into custody under a writ of attachment or similar process. In this sense, per corpus described the physical arrest of a defendant or respondent as the operative act of legal compulsion.
Both usages reflect the medieval common law's reliance on the body — whether as combatant or as detainee — as the instrument through which legal processes were initiated or resolved.
Common Confusion
Per corpus is occasionally confused with corpus delicti or habeas corpus, which share the Latin root corpus (body) but operate in entirely different legal contexts. Corpus delicti refers to the body of the crime — the proof that a crime occurred. Habeas corpus is a writ commanding that a detained person be brought before a court to test the legality of detention. Per corpus, by contrast, is a procedural descriptor from medieval English law, not a doctrine or writ in itself. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical sources should resist reading backward from modern "corpus" usages.
Why It Matters in Research
Per corpus is a term of exclusively historical significance. Researchers will encounter it only in medieval and early modern English legal sources — principally in Bracton and Fleta — and in secondary dictionaries that draw on those sources (Burrill being the primary American example). It has no operational meaning in modern law.
Two navigational points are worth noting:
First, the contrast between per corpus and per patriam is a live research thread for anyone studying the transition from trial by combat to trial by jury in English legal history. The tension between these two modes of proof — physical ordeal versus communal verdict — is a foundational episode in the development of the common law, and per corpus marks the older of the two poles.
Second, the attachment usage (bodily seizure under process) connects to a long history of in personam enforcement mechanisms. Researchers tracing the origins of body execution, arrest on mesne process, or the distinction between in personam and in rem jurisdiction in historical sources will find per corpus appearing in this enforcement context.
Neither usage generates modern research obligations, but both can anchor a researcher in the correct historical moment when parsing dense Latin passages in Bracton, Fleta, or commentaries derived from them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this entry, and its treatment is compact but accurate. Burrill correctly identifies both the combat and attachment meanings and cites Bracton (fol. 133b) and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 31, § 2 for combat; lib. 2, c. 60, § 33 for attachment) as primary authorities. These citations are reliable anchors for researchers who need to verify the phrase in original sources.
Burrill does not elaborate on the broader procedural significance of per corpus within the wager of battel system, nor does it situate the phrase within the historical decline of trial by combat in English law. Researchers who need that context will need to move beyond dictionary sources to Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law or Thayer's Preliminary Treatise on Evidence, neither of which is adequately substituted by the dictionary entry alone.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus (not Black's, not Bouvier's) appears to carry a dedicated entry for this phrase, which itself signals how narrowly the term is confined to specialist historical research.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia — Habeas Corpus: Exhaustion and Procedural Default (criminal_236) provides useful background on the habeas corpus writ as a body-based legal process, offering modern context that illuminates how far the concept of corpus-as-enforcement has traveled from its per corpus origins.