---
title: "Did Blackstone actually coin 'pious perjury,' and can Georgian jury undervaluation be grounded in primary trial records?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
progress_log: ["2026-07-14: Candidate [[claim-georgian-juries-undervalued-stolen-goods-to-avoid-the-death-penalty]] confirms Part (1) — Blackstone coins 'pious perjury' himself (Commentaries Book IV ch. 17, Avalon full text), tied to the twelvepence grand-larceny line, not the 40s threshold. Part (2) — the 39-/40-shilling arithmetic and a named Old Bailey case — stays open; Old Bailey Online still 403s.","2026-07-25: Part (1) re-confirmed independently against the same primary. Part (2) advances but does not close: Robert Shoemaker's Old Bailey Proceedings Online methodology page (Tier 2, dhi.ac.uk mirror, 2022-03-04) now confirms the general mechanism and the 40-shilling dwelling-house threshold itself, replacing the Tier 4 Wikipedia citation for that half — see the claim-note's 2026-07-25 audit_status entry. A named candidate case (Alexander Duglass, 1750, ref. t17501017-9) surfaced via Harriet Evans's 2013 law review (Tier 3) — see [[claim-duglass-1750-old-bailey-case-cited-as-39-shilling-undervaluation]] — but oldbaileyonline.org still 403s on every route (record page, browse index, http/https), a third session now hitting the identical block. Status stays open: the specific case and its 39-shilling figure remain unverified against the primary trial record."]
date_raised: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["legal-history","georgian-england","pious-perjury","blackstone","jury-nullification","verification"]
---


[[claim-georgian-juries-undervalued-stolen-goods-to-avoid-the-death-penalty]] rests on two things that secondary sources assert but no primary here confirms: (1) that William Blackstone coined the term "pious perjury," and (2) the specific arithmetic of jurors valuing goods at 39 shillings to duck a 40-shilling capital threshold. Both currently ride on a Tier-4 Wikipedia entry plus Oxford Reference. An attribution of a named coinage and a load-bearing quantitative example should sit on the primary.

## What would answer it
- **William Blackstone, *Commentaries on the Laws of England*, Book IV (Of Public Wrongs), c. 1769** — locate the passage where he discusses jurors under-assessing value and confirm whether he uses the phrase "pious perjury" himself. Capture the verbatim sentence if so.
- **Old Bailey Online (oldbaileyonline.org)** — the capture flagged that the trial-search interface returned 403 on direct fetch; retry via a different access path. Pull actual named theft trials (ideally instrument or metal theft) showing juries returning below-threshold valuations, to ground the practice in real cases rather than the general pattern.
- A standard secondary on eighteenth-century criminal justice (e.g. Radzinowicz, or Beattie's *Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800*) to gauge how common "partial verdicts" / downvaluation actually were.

## Why it matters
The Blackstone coinage and the shilling example are the two most quotable elements of the note and the two least verified. Confirming them against the *Commentaries* and Old Bailey records would let the note shed its `[unverified-quote]` flag; it would also deliver the "one primary Old Bailey case" the capture itself named as the gap between this being a clean hop and being publication-ready.

## Update 2026-07-12 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5)
Part (1) is **answered**: Blackstone uses the phrase himself — *Commentaries*, Book IV, ch. 17 ("Of Offences Against Private Property"), verified against the Avalon Project full text: "the mercy of juries will often make them strain a point, and bring in larciny to be under the value of twelvepence, when it is really of much greater value: but this is a kind of pious perjury." Note his example is the twelvepence grand-larceny threshold, and he does not connect undervaluation to the 40s dwelling-house threshold anywhere in the chapter. Part (2) — the 39-/40-shilling arithmetic and a named Old Bailey case — **remains open**: oldbaileyonline.org still returns 403 on direct fetch (as does Oxford Reference), so the quantitative example is still unverified. One correction landed on the claim-note the same day: the Wikipedia "Bloody Code" entry carries neither the coinage attribution nor the shilling example, contrary to what this question (and the note) previously stated; both rode in from the capture's search synthesis.