The case of Hales v. Petit, reported at 1 Plowd. 253 in Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries (1571), arose from the death of Sir James Hales, Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and lord of the Manor of the Dungeon in Canterbury.

Background

Sir James Hales drowned himself in a watercourse near the Dungeon estate in August 1554. He had refused to seal the device altering the succession in favor of Lady Jane Grey, and had later insisted at the Kent assizes that existing religious statutes remained law until Parliament changed them. Under Mary I he was imprisoned, and after his release he took his own life.

Under the common law of England, a person who willfully killed themselves was felo de se, a felon of themselves, and their property was forfeit to the Crown. The question before the Court of Exchequer was at what moment the felony occurred.

The Legal Question

The court received arguments that an act, to be legally complete, requires three branches: to act, to do, and to perform. When Sir James entered the water with intent to drown, all three branches were satisfied at that moment, while he was still living. His subsequent death was the consequence of that completed act. The felony was therefore committed during his lifetime, and the forfeiture of his estate to the Crown was sustained.

The Shakespeare Connection

Plowden’s Commentaries were widely read in Elizabethan legal circles. The three-branch argument from Hales v. Petit was well known enough that Shakespeare drew on it in the gravediggers’ scene of Hamlet (c. 1600-1601). The First Clown’s argument that “an act hath three branches, it is to act, to do, to perform” directly echoes the language in Plowden’s report, and scholars have long identified this as the source.

Source

Plowden, Edmund. Commentaries, 1571. 1 Plowd. 253. Public domain. Available through HeinOnline and the Internet Archive.