Subject

‘Subject’ entered the English language from multiple sources, including the classical Latin subiectus, which indicated a subordinate or dependent individual ruled by a monarch or sovereign state, and from the Anglo-Norman suget, suject, and its variants. The subject's political, legal, and social identities thus had a long tradition in England, whose foundations were firmly rooted in common and civil law. Dating as far back as the thirteenth century, the ‘subject’, as position and identity, was legally defined through a complicated mixture of both ‘soil and blood’. ¹ Early modern subjecthood had its foundations in medieval ideas of territorial allegiance, established at birth. The thirteenth-century English jurist and cleric Henry de Bracton acknowledged this when he suggested that foreign-born subjects of another king could not be heard at an English court ‘as an Englishman is not heard, if he implead any one concerning lands and tenements in France’. ² This meant that allegiance, and subsequently subjecthood, was ‘based on territory – not by virtue of land one owned, but because of the monarch in whose land one was born’. ³ Bracton's definition of subjecthood highlighted the common law tradition in England from which jus soli (‘right of the soil’) stemmed from. On the other hand, the idea of jus sanguinis (‘right of blood’), which had its roots in civil law, also fashioned English legal perceptions of subjecthood.