Neck Verse

Abstract:Mitigations in medieval criminal law, designed to prevent or defer execution, have been regarded in a variety of ways: as acts of mercy, as discretionary measures, and as travesties of justice. For post-medieval English and American writers they also represent the past of the law; since at least the eighteenth century they have formed the backbone of legal histories describing the passage from premodern to modern law and from a less to a more equitable distribution of justice. This essay argues that the mitigations inherited from the Middle Ages are "medievalisms-at-law,” serving both as anachronisms—throwbacks to an ostensibly more corrupt or superstitious age—and as touchstones for modernity. When current, they often feel out of time because death is on the line; when obsolete, they abide, both in literature and in law. Seemingly conducive to progressive histories, they threaten to drag modernity back into the Middle Ages. This essay focuses on one such mitigation, the benefit of clergy, which, thanks to its famous “neck verse,” was used not only to obtain mercy for some but also to prevent others from claiming the same benefit. As this essay argues, its potential both to save and exclude is part of what reactivates the benefit of clergy in post-medieval English literature and law. The survival of this legal practice in American slave law, and even in present political discourse, reminds us that old laws never die, nor do they entirely fade away. Instead they go on to create new histories of law, justice, class, and nation.