Definition
Latin: "He puts himself upon the country." A formal Latin phrase used in English criminal practice to record a defendant's plea of not guilty. When a defendant entered a plea of not guilty, the court record expressed this act in these words, signifying that the defendant submitted the question of guilt or innocence to determination by a jury of the country — that is, to trial by peers rather than by some other form of adjudication. The abbreviated form "po. se." appears in older English court records in place of the full phrase.
The phrase captures a constitutional and procedural idea: by pleading not guilty, the defendant invoked the right to jury trial, placing the matter before the community ("the country") for resolution.
---
Common Confusion
"Ponit se super patriam" describes the defendant's act of submitting to jury trial. It should not be confused with the corresponding prosecutorial formula "mise en pays" or the phrase "per patriam," which refers to trial by the country as a mechanism rather than the pleading act itself. Researchers should also distinguish it from the phrase "in pais" (or "en pais"), which relates to matters occurring outside court and carries an entirely different meaning.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a feature of historical English criminal practice records. Researchers encountering it will most often find it in pre-modern plea rolls, indictment records, or English common law treatises rather than in American sources. Its appearance in a legal document reliably signals a formal not-guilty plea and the invocation of jury trial.
Two navigational points deserve attention:
First, the phrase survived in English court record-keeping long after Latin was formally abolished from most English legal proceedings by statutes in the eighteenth century, and it may appear in abbreviated form ("po. se.") in records where the full Latin is not written out. Researchers must recognize the abbreviation to interpret the record correctly.
Second, this term has essentially no living presence in American practice. American courts adopted plain-English pleading conventions, and the phrase does not appear in U.S. procedural codes or modern case law. Its relevance in the Law Mind corpus is therefore backward-looking: it is a key to reading English primary sources, not a term with ongoing doctrinal significance.
Researchers working with early English criminal records, plea rolls, or historical treatises on criminal procedure — including works like Hale's Pleas of the Crown or Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown — will encounter this formula as a standard element of the record-keeping apparatus, not as a substantive legal doctrine in itself.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary consulted here provide identical definitions, reflecting the phrase's fixed and uncontested meaning: "He puts himself upon the country," marking the recorded plea of not guilty. There is no divergence between sources, which itself is informative — this is a term of art with a single, stable meaning that generated no interpretive controversy.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the deeper procedural significance of the formula. The act of putting oneself "upon the country" was not merely a clerical notation; it was the moment at which the defendant elected trial by jury over other possible modes of trial (such as trial by battle or compurgation in earlier periods). The formula thus encodes a foundational choice within the common law system. Historical dictionaries treat it as a record-keeping phrase; researchers interested in its deeper procedural meaning will need to consult treatises on the history of English criminal procedure.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is specific to English common law practice and has no operative role in modern American, Canadian, or Australian courts. It appears in historical English records and treatises. Researchers working in jurisdictions that inherited English common law procedure may encounter it in historical primary sources, but it carries no current procedural force in any of those systems.
---