Abstract
“Rule of thumb” is a seventeenth‑century English expression meaning a rough‑and‑ready guideline based on practical experience—literally, on what one could measure with a thumb. It has nothing to do with any law about wife‑beating; that story is a much later myth.
Earliest appearances and literal sense
- 1658: the Puritan preacher James Durham wrote that some builders “build by guess, and by rule of thumb, and not by Square and Rule.”
- 1692: Sir William Hope’s fencing manual says a clumsy swordsman “doth by rule of Thumb and not by Art.”
In an age before precision tools, many crafts used the thumb as a quick gauge:
- a cloth‑worker’s “thumb’s breadth” stood for about an inch;
- brewers tested mash temperature by plunging a thumb;
- carpenters marked joints by thumb‑width.
From these trades the figurative sense—“a convenient approximation rather than an exact formula”—spread into general speech.
The wife‑beating myth
A popular tale claims the phrase came from an English common‑law rule letting a husband beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. The story hinges on an 1782 newspaper squib mocking Judge Sir Francis Buller as “Judge Thumb”, but no such statute, precedent, or commentary has ever been found, and Buller’s remark itself is doubtful.
Academic research in the 1990s showed the connection was invented in the United States during the 1970s, entered a few law‑review articles and civil‑rights reports, and was then repeated uncritically. Linguistic evidence makes clear that the idiom was already well‑established for more than a century before Buller’s caricature.
Why the myth persists
The image is vivid, fits modern concerns about historic violence against women, and seemed to offer a neat moral. Because it first appeared in otherwise serious legal writing, it gained credibility and spread to textbooks and journalism before etymologists had a chance to refute it. Today dictionaries and style guides warn against the folk etymology, but it still circulates.
That having said …
Early English common‑law writers treated a husband’s “moderate correction” of his wife as lawful, in the same way a master might correct a servant or a parent a child. From the late seventeenth century, the courts began to frown on the practice, and a line of decisions and statutes between the 1700s and 1890s effectively swept the doctrine away. By the end of the nineteenth century a husband who struck his wife was liable to criminal prosecution like anyone else.
The common‑law doctrine of “moderate correction”
- Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765‑69), summing up earlier authorities, states that “by the old law” the husband “might give his wife moderate correction” because he was answerable for her behaviour. The passage explicitly likens the power to a parent’s right to chastise a child.
- Blackstone immediately adds, however, that “in the politer reign of Charles II [1660‑85] this power of correction began to be doubted.” Early modern judges were already questioning the custom’s place in a more civil society.
The doctrine was never absolute. Even its defenders stressed two limits:
- Proportionality – blows must be “moderate,” not “black and blue.”
- Instruments – no weapons likely to cause grievous harm; cases record judges rebuking men who used faggots, whips, or cudgels.
A husband who maimed or killed his wife was always guilty of felony. What the law tolerated—grudgingly—was a short, mild beating meant, in theory, to enforce domestic discipline.
Judicial retreat, 17th‑18th centuries
From the later Stuart period onward, higher courts increasingly repudiated any right to violence:
- Reports from assizes in the late 1600s and early 1700s show judges charging juries that “correction” must never jeopardise the wife’s life or limbs.
- Satire and scandal—most famously the 1782 newspaper cartoon calling Mr Justice Buller “Judge Thumb”—mocked judges thought to favour wife‑beating, showing how socially contentious the notion had become.
By 1800 the doctrine survived mainly as a folk belief among the “lower ranks,” to quote the Alabama Supreme Court when it finally rejected chastisement in Fulgham v State (1871).
Victorian legislation and case‑law
- Criminal Procedure Act 1853 (Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children Act) empowered magistrates to imprison men for up to six months at hard labour for wife‑beating, signalling that Parliament now treated such assaults as public crimes, not private discipline.
- The Summary Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act 1895 let wives obtain legal separation and maintenance if a husband was violent—a civil remedy impossible under strict coverture.
- The Court of Appeal in R v Jackson (1891) refused to let a husband imprison his estranged wife to enforce “conjugal rights,” declaring that a wife was “not the husband’s chattel.” Though Jackson concerned confinement, the reasoning swept away any lingering notion of physical coercion within marriage.
By the 1890s English judges were quite explicit: any unjustified force against a wife was an assault, and the old common‑law licence was “a relic of barbarism.” The same pattern occurred in the United States, beginning with Fulgham (1871) and spreading through state courts in the 1870s–90s.
However, what never existed: the “thumb‑thick stick” rule
No English statute or reported decision ever authorised wife‑beating with a rod “no thicker than a man’s thumb.” As described above, the maxim appears first in mid‑nineteenth‑century press anecdotes and was popularised in 1970s American legal writing; historians have found no legal source for it. The genuine doctrine spoke only of “moderate” force, not precise dimensions.
Meanwhile …
Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1641
The Body of Liberties—the first comprehensive code enacted by the Puritan settlers—contains a short but unambiguous clause:
“Every married woman shall be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband…” (Liberty 80, “Liberties of Women”).
Except for genuine self-defence, any “just cause of correction” had to be brought before a local court; private violence was ruled out. A separate 1655 edict reinforced the same principle with a sliding scale of fines. In other words, one of the earliest statutes produced in North America flatly withdrew the old English licence.
Byzantine (Roman) Empire, A.D. 542
Emperor Justinian’s Novel 117, ch. XIV, legislates against wife-beating inside marriage:
“If a man should beat his wife with a whip or a rod… the husband … shall give her by way of compensation … a sum equal in value to the ante-nuptial donation, to be taken out of his other property.”
While the marriage itself was not automatically dissolved, the husband faced a heavy financial penalty—often a ruinous one—whenever he struck without one of a handful of legally recognised grounds (the same Novel lists them in detail). The compensation rule amounts to a statutory prohibition backed by a clearly specified sanction more than a millennium before the common-law world abandoned “moderate chastisement”.
Medieval Norway: the Gulating Law (c. 11th–12th century)
Among the earliest written Scandinavian codes, Gulatingslova imposed escalating penalties:
- a monetary fine whenever a husband hit his wife in the presence of witnesses;
- automatic divorce in the wife’s favour if he hit her a third time, together with a share of household property.
The statute treated repeated blows as so serious an insult that the woman could leave the marriage with economic security—an unusually strong remedy for its age.
And also …
| 1655 – Massachusetts Bay (supplemental order) | “No man shall strike his wife nor any woman her husband, on penalty of such fine not exceeding ten pounds for one offence….” | Fixed monetary fines for any blow; courts routinely enforced them. |
| 1545 – 1550s Geneva (Calvin’s Reformation city) | City council enactments, reinforced by Consistory discipline, listed “wife‑beating” among the criminal delicts to be punished by gaol and public penance. | Surviving Consistory minutes show men hauled up, fined, and occasionally jailed for a single slap. |
| c. 900 (Wales, codified 13th c.) – Cyfraith Hywel | A husband who beat his wife for anything other than three specified grounds (illicit gift‑giving, adultery, or cursing his beard) owed her the heavy sarhad fine; otherwise the assault was illegal. | Because sarhad was paid to the woman and her kindred, kin had a financial incentive to sue an abusive husband. |
Leave a Reply