[Dragaera] Is Kelly foolish?

[Michael Wojcik]

On 2010-09-24 19:04, Jon Lincicum wrote:
> ----- "Philip Hart" <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>  
>> Isn't any crime in a monarchy a form of treason?
> 
> I don't think this follows. Treason is crime designed specifically
> to overthrow or undermine the stability of a government. There are
> plenty of types of crime that do not rise to this level. 

Obviously this depends on what sort of definition (popular, legal,
philosophical, etc) you're using for "treason", and what warrants that
definition - for example, if you're using a legal definition, what
body of law you're referring to.

But in, say, early modern England, treason was not limited to criminal
acts "to overthrow or undermine the stability of a government". Any of
a wide variety of crimes against a person of authority, or against the
social hierarchy, were treasonous. Crimes against the monarch or
government constituted high treason; crimes against other authorities
were petty treason.

Thus, for example, a servant who murdered his or her master was guilty
of petty treason. So was a wife who murdered her husband. A husband
who murdered his wife in EME, on the other hand, was guilty of murder
but not of petty treason, because wives held no legal authority over
their husbands.

Crimes against the state per se were de jure crimes against the
personage of the monarch in the earlier part of the early modern
period in England, just as they were in France right up until the
Revolution ("l'etat c'est moi"). But in England this association was
gradually decoupled as the progressive devolution of power from the
monarch to lesser aristocracy (most famously with the Magna Carta, but
this was an extended process) and civil institutions (Parliament, the
circuit courts, etc). Thus you can see this idea examined in various
forms in, say, Shakespeare's histories; but not long after Milton
trashes it in "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates". This shift opens the
possibility of actions against the state (eg strikes) that were not
legally treasonous.

And there were always any number of crimes and civil complaints, even
under the old strong monarchy, that were not treason.

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University