The defence was still permitted in civil actions for debt and vestiges of it survived until its statutory repeal at various times in common law countries: in England in 1833,[1] and Queensland at some point before the Queensland Common Practice Act of 1867[2] which makes direct reference to the abolition of wager of law.
[3] Latin com- is also an intensifier[4] and turns a word into the superlative form, so compurgation, by etymology, means "to thoroughly clean or excuse".
The procedure in a wager of law is traced by Blackstone to the Mosaic law, Exodus 22:10–15; but it seems historically to have been derived from the system of compurgation, introduced into England from Normandy, a system which is now thought to have had an appreciable effect on the development of the English jury.
[Compurgation] had originated in Anglo-Saxon England in the ties of kinship that bound people together in the period before the year 1000, a time when each man was responsible for the acts of his blood relatives.
They aligned themselves with a neighbour who was accused in court and swore that in good conscience they believed he was telling the truth.
[5] A variation was for the defendant to give gage, or sureties, in an action of debt, and "that at a certain day assigned he would take a law, or oath, in open court, that he did not owe the debt, and at the same time bring with him eleven neighbors (called compurgators), who should avow upon their oaths that they believed in their consciences that he spoke the truth" (see the Tractatus of Glanvill, c. 1188).
One reason for the long survival of the practice was that 'wagers in law' were often considered better evidence than account books in cases of debt.
5. c. 6), refers to the then late rebellion in Wales and complains that the Welshmen are still taking revenge for the deaths of their kinsmen against the king's faithful lieges.
[6]The taking of oaths was an eminently unsatisfactory way of arriving at the merits of a claim, and it is therefore not surprising to find that the policy of the law was in favour of its restriction rather than of its extension.
[5] The Lateran Council of 1215 effectively abolished trial by ordeal in Catholic countries (which England was at the time) by forbidding priests from taking part, thus robbing it of its legitimacy.
This led to the general adoption of assumpsit – proceeding originally upon a fictitious averment of a promise by the defendant – as a means of recovering debts.
This freed the people at the scene of criminal liability, but they were bound to pay blood money to the agnates of the decedent.