5 - Defamation suits

Summary

‘The amount of litigation aroused by slander’, wrote Marchant referring to the long sixteenth century, ‘was a phenomenon of the age.’ Slander could be prosecuted in both secular and spiritual courts. By 1550, where one pursued the case depended, in theory at least, on the nature of the accusation embodied in the slander. If someone was the subject of a malicious accusation alleging the perpetration of an offence punishable at common law, then the case should have been pursued in a secular court; if, however, the accusation was one punishable by the ecclesiastical law, then the complaint should have been pressed in the church courts. Thus a remark that someone was a thief should have gone to a secular tribunal, whilst a remark that someone was a whore should have gone to the church courts. In practice, the distinctions were not as clear cut as legal theory suggested, particularly in the case of mixed or multiple slanders, and one can find secular allegations being pursued in spiritual courts and spiritual allegations being actioned in secular tribunals. Both judicial systems, however, witnessed a remarkable growth in slander litigation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Even before the Reformation, defamation causes were prominent amongst instance litigation in the ecclesiastical courts. In the later fifteenth century they comprised a third of church court business in London, and by the 1520s they became the most numerous type of case in the Canterbury consistory court.