Definition
Perjurium is the Latin form of perjury, used in civil law and old English legal sources to denote the offense of making a false oath or willfully breaking an oath already sworn. In its classical usage, perjurium encompassed both the breach of a sworn oath and the affirmative act of swearing falsely — the two being treated as essentially the same wrong. The term appears throughout Roman law texts, particularly the Digest and later civilian authorities, and carried over into early English legal writing before the anglicized form perjury displaced it in ordinary usage.
As encountered in historical legal sources, perjurium does not map perfectly onto the modern statutory offense of perjury. The classical conception was broader in one respect — it treated oath-breaking itself as the wrong, regardless of whether a judicial proceeding was involved — while the modern offense is narrower and procedurally specific, requiring a false statement made under oath in a context where such an oath is legally authorized or required.
Common Confusion
Perjurium and perjury are not interchangeable in research contexts, though they share the same root offense. Perjurium, as a Latin term of art, appears in civil law sources and in early English materials drawing on Roman authority. When a historical source uses perjurium, it may be invoking the civilian doctrinal tradition rather than the common law offense. Researchers conflating the two risk misreading the scope of authority being cited: a civilian source discussing perjurium may not be describing an offense cognizable in English common law courts at the time.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research significance of perjurium is as a signal of civilian influence. When the term appears in a legal text — particularly pre-eighteenth century — it marks the passage as drawing on Roman law or the learned law tradition rather than the common law. This matters for source evaluation: the doctrinal rules surrounding perjurium in the Digest and in civilian commentaries differ from those developed by English common law courts.
Researchers working in ecclesiastical law, admiralty, or early equity sources will encounter perjurium more frequently than those working in common law materials. Ecclesiastical courts, which operated under civilian procedure well into the modern period, had jurisdiction over oath-breaking as a moral and spiritual offense — a jurisdiction grounded directly in the perjurium tradition. Common law courts, by contrast, developed perjury as a temporal offense through a distinct doctrinal path.
The Burrill entry is fragmentary as preserved, but the portion referencing conjuratores — oath-helpers in the compurgation system — points to an important historical connection. In early medieval English practice, the failure of compurgators (who swore to a party's credibility) to swear truly was treated as perjurium. This usage is archaic and has no modern equivalent, but it surfaces in historical materials dealing with trial by compurgation and is easily misread without awareness of the term's older application.
For corpus researchers: perjurium in a Latin source is not automatically a reference to a crime in the modern sense. It may describe a canonical wrong, a ground for ecclesiastical discipline, or a procedural consequence in a civil law context. The doctrinal weight and consequence of the term shifts substantially depending on the jurisdictional and procedural context of the source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry, though truncated in the preserved text, correctly identifies the core meaning — perjury, the breach of an oath, the making of a false oath — and traces the Latin derivation through perjurare and its components per and jurare. The reference to conjuratores making a false sacramentum (oath) reflects the term's application in the compurgation context, which Burrill acknowledges as part of civil and old English law usage.
What Burrill's entry does not address, and what historical dictionaries of this era generally underserve, is the distinction between perjurium as a moral and canonical wrong versus perjurium as a legally actionable offense. Roman law itself treated perjury as primarily a matter between the perjurer and the gods — the Digest reflects considerable ambiguity about whether perjurium gave rise to a civil action — and civilian commentators inherited that ambiguity. The transition from divine sanction to temporal punishment is a doctrinal story that Burrill's brief entry does not tell. Researchers who need that development should consult broader treatments of oath law in Roman and canon law sources rather than relying on dictionary entries alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The term perjurium is jurisdiction-specific in the sense that it belongs to the civilian and ecclesiastical legal traditions. It does not appear as a technical term in English common law pleading after the early modern period. Researchers working in Scottish law, which retained greater civilian influence, may encounter perjurium in somewhat later sources than those working exclusively in English materials.