1. Hist. Of or relating to an offense that cannot be expiated or otherwise remedied by the payment of a fine, the offender being required to suffer loss of liberty or life. • Boteless offenses appeared in Anglo-Saxon Britain about A.D. 700. They appear to have involved treason or violence against the king.
2. Hist. Without relief or remedy; without the privilege of making satisfaction for a crime by pecuniary payment. • The modern word bootless is derived from this term. Cf. BOTE(2).
“In the laws of Ine it appeared possible, in the discretion of the kind, to put certain offenders to death, rather than let them save themselves by paying a money fine. This involved a step in the modern direction, as far as criminal law is concerned. The ‘boteless’ offense, that is, the offense which can not be fully expiated by the payment of a money fine so that the guilty person must suffer loss of liberty or life is so familiar to us that we take it as a matter of course; it seems, however, to have first appeared in Anglo-Saxon Britain about the year A.D. 700. In general, these ‘boteless’ offenses seem to have appeared in connection with matter that we would say now involved treason or violence offered to the king.” Charles Herman Kinnane, A First Book on Anglo-American Law 216–17 (2d ed. 1952).
