In a modern English Encyclopædia of Law it is suggested that the habit of kissing the Book did not become recognised in the English Courts until the middle of the seventeenth century, and that it only became general in the latter part of the eighteenth century. For my part, I cannot subscribe to that view. It is true that there is very little direct authority in any ancient law book on practice which enables one to say what the practice was. But that is because the old lawyers did not consider “kissing the Book” essential to the oath, and the practice was so universally followed that there was no need to describe it.
Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” about 1613. He gives Stephano, when offering Caliban the bottle, these lines: “Come, swear to this; kiss the book:—I will furnish it anon with new contents:—swear. (Gives Caliban drink.)” And a few lines later on Caliban says, “I’ll kiss thy foot; I’ll swear myself thy subject.” To me, reading the scene to-day, and bearing in mind that it was a low-comedy scene written to amuse the groundlings, the conclusion is irresistible that Shakespeare drew his simile from the common stock of everyday affairs, and that the idea of kissing the Book was as familiar to the average playgoer at the Globe or the Curtain as it is to-day to the pittite at His Majesty’s. Beaumont and Fletcher, too, in Women Pleased, II, vi, have the lines: “Oaths I swear to you ... and kiss the book, too”; and no doubt, if diligent search were made in the Elizabethan writers other such popular references could be found.
Samuel Butler, who, we must remember, was clerk to Sir Samuel Luke, of Bedfordshire, and other Puritan Justices of the Peace, and therefore had administered the oath many hundreds of times prior to the Restoration, has the following passage in “Hudibras” concerning a perjurer:—
“Can make the Gospel serve his turn,
And helps him out; to be forsworn;
When ’tis laid hands upon and kiss’d;
To be betrayed and sold like Christ.”
This is, I think, conclusive that in 1660, in the common form of oath, the practice was for the witness to lay the hand upon the Book and afterwards to kiss it.
Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, writing to Lord Burghley, describing Serjeant Anderson taking his seat as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1582, notes that: “Then the clarke of the corone, Powle, did read hym his oathe, and after, he himself read the oathe of the supremacie, and so kist the booke.” This, of course, was a ceremonial oath, but it throws light upon the custom. Although the direct references to kissing the Book are few and far between, several interesting specimens are given in Notes and Queries from early Irish records, showing that oaths were taken both upon holy relics and upon the Holy Gospels, corporaliter tacta et deosculata, in the time of Henry VI., and that in the reign of Edward I. kissing the Book was an incident of the official oath of the Exchequer. It is possible that a close study of the records of a Catholic country would throw light upon the origin of kissing the Book, which, from a Protestant point of view, is doubtless as superstitious a custom as kissing relics or the Pope’s toe or a crucifix. It was said by John Coltus, the Archbishop of Armagh, in 1397, that the English introduced the custom of swearing on the Holy Evangelists into Ireland, and that in earlier days the Irish resorted to croziers, bells, and other sacred reliquaries to give solemnity to their declarations. That kissing the Book is directly evolved from the superstitious but reverential worship of holy relics can scarcely be doubted. When Harold pledged his solemn oath to William the Conqueror, we learn in the old French Roman de Rou how William piled up a reliquary with holy bodies and put a pall over them to conceal them, and, having persuaded Harold to take the oath upon these hidden relics, he afterwards showed Harold what he had done, and Heraut forment s’espoanta, Harold was sadly alarmed. Curious, but interesting, is the form of oath here described. Harold first of all suz sa main tendi, held his hand over the reliquary, then he repeated the words of his oath, and then li sainz beisiez kissed the relics. It is almost the same ceremony that we have to-day, and in the same order. The Book is held in the hand, the words of the oath are repeated, and then the Book is kissed.
The Rev. James Tyler, in his interesting book on oaths, quotes an eleventh-century oath of Ingeltrude, wife of Boston, that she swore to Pope Nicholas, as one of the earliest examples of kissing the Book. It runs thus: “I, Ingeltrude, swear to my Lord Nicholas, the chief Pontiff and universal Pope, by the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and these four Evangelists of Christ our God which I hold in my hands and kiss with my mouth.” This early example of the habit shows that kissing the Book was contemporaneous with kissing bells, crucifixes and relics, and that the religious origin of the custom is similar. In the Roman Catholic ritual the priest still kisses the Gospel after he has read it, and I have been told that this is done in some Anglican churches. It is curious that the ceremony should survive in the law courts and have died out in most of the churches. But in these things the average man violently strains at gnats and complacently swallows camels. The Roman ceremony of kissing the Book—which is done reverently by the priest as part of a religious ceremony—would distress a Protestant, who watches the kissing of the same Book in a modern police court without the least sign of moral or mental disturbance.