Felony

Reference 1, the book noticed in the post before last, that is to say reference 2, has yielded its first gem.

I had believed for a long time that a felony was an offence which, until fairly recently, was punishable by death, that is to say a felony a one word abbreviation of the two word phrase capital offence.

Hanawalt offers a variation, writing that a felony was an offence which could no be compounded by paying the person offended compensation, compensation which was called bot, bote or boot. So serious that any case arising from it had to be taken by one of the king's justices, or perhaps by the king himself. A mere justice of the peace would not do. And kings (in England anyway) discouraged their vassals from taking such cases in their own courts, not least because many such offences arose from the activities of those vassals themselves.

OED (first edition) allows both bot and bote, but reserves its thunder, getting on for five columns of it, for the various meanings of boot. With one cluster of meanings being to do with boot a good thing, while another is to do with boot a sort of shoe. From the first of which we get to the boot you have to pay someone to compensate them for some wrong you have done them.

One variant is the phrase 'to boot' meaning to qualify something which is thrown in to make up the amount or, weaker, just in addition. This is a sense which Google attributes to Shakespeare. So in Henry IV part I, Act II, Scene ii, line 97 we have: 'by my sceptre, and my soul to boot'.

While I remember 'it boots you not', for its no good complaining now, perhaps advice given to someone being led off to execution.

Reference 1: Crime and conflict in English communities 1300-1348 - Barbara Hanawalt - 1979.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/abebooks.html.