ABSTRACT
When Henry VII ascended the English throne, the crime of high treason rested largely for its definition on the statute of 1352, 25 Edw. III st. 5 c. 2. There it was clearly separated from petty treason, which was the slaying of a master by his servant, husband by his wife or prelate by a lesser cleric. High treason, although the adjective high did not appear regularly before the end of the fourteenth century, was to include only offences against the king's person and his regality. These were listed as: to compass or imagine the death of the king, his queen or the royal heir; to violate the king's consort, his eldest daughter or the wife of his eldest son; to levy war against the king in his realm or adhere to the king's enemies and be provably attaint of it by men of the offender's own condition; to counterfeit the great or privy seal or the king's coin, to introduce counterfeit money into England knowing it to be false; also to kill the chancellor, treasurer, or a justice of either bench, of eyre, of assize or of oyer and terminer while executing his office. Why the statute took the shape it did is to be discovered in the way treason had been defined in previous cases under the common law and also in the course of mid-fourteenth-century English politics. In enunciating the definition of 1352, Edward III was prompted chiefly by demand in recent parliaments that he should declare exactly what treason was, since royal justices had of late been holding as such crimes which had never been so interpreted in the past. These justices, and through them juries, so it seems, had been over zealous in their interpretations, calling felonies treasons and afforcing indictments by talk of accroachment of the royal power. Either they or King Edward may have been affected by new knowledge of continental law, but whatever the inspiration the purpose was clear enough. They hoped by extending the category of treason, and thereby inflicting heavier and more certain punishment, to suppress local lawlessness; no doubt they also hoped to replenish their master's coffers by the forfeitures incurred. Another reason, though perhaps of less import, for the new act may have been supplication by the magnates that Edward should annul the convictions against a small group of men who had been condemned for treason over twenty years before. There is however no indication that the baronage brought any strong pressure to bear.
