BATTERY, in criminal law, means the beating or wounding, or more correctly. an assault by beating or wounding of another. Violence or torte is not n necessary element in this offense, but the least touching, however trifling, of another's person in an angry, rude, insulting manner, is a B.; for the law, says Blackstone, cannot draw the line between different degrees of violence, and therefore totally prohibits the first and lowest stage of it, every man's person being sacred, and 110 one having a right to meddle with it in any the slightest manner. The remedy for an injury of this kind may be either by a civil action, as for damages, or by indictment, as for a misdemeanor. Where the 13. is on a inau's wife, the former may sue for damages by action of trespass, and it must be brought in the names of the husband and wife joiutly; but if the maltreatment be so serious as to have deprived the husband for any time of his wife's company, the law then gives him a separate remedy, by an action in which he rimy recover special damage, on the ground of the loss of his wife's society, whilst suffering from the beating. By the common law procedure act, the 13 and 10 Viet. c. 76, the remedy for such ill usage is further varied. for by section 40 of that act, it is provided, that in any action brought by a man and his wife for an injury done to the latter, it shall be lawful for the husband to add thereto claims in his own right, and separate actions brought in respect of such claims may be consolidated, if the court or a judge shall think fit.
It is a good defense to prove that the alleged B. happened by accident, or that it was not in anger, or that it was merely the correction which a parent or master is entitled to use to a child, or scholar, or servant, or that it was done in self-defunse, or in defense of a wife, a husband, a parent, a child, a master, or a servant; or that it was such personal force as a proper officer was entitled to employ, or that the defend ant has already been summarily proceeded against under the 24 and 25 Viet. c. 100, by sections 44 and 45 of which net it is provided that further proceedings shall be barred where the complaint has been disposed of by two justices either by conviction or dis missal of the case, provided, in the former case, the defendant has paid the penalty, and suffered the imprisonment awarded; and, in the latter, Um magistrates have dismissed the case, because it was justified. or so trifling as not to merit punishment, and this be forthwith certified under their hands.
In the Scotch law, there was what was called a B. pendent& lite, which consisted in assaulting an adversary in a lawsuit during its dependence. This peculiar offense was created by two old Scotch statutes passed respectively in, 1584 and 1304—and which curiously provided as a punishment the loss of the cause to the offender—but they were repealed in 1826 by the 7 Geo. IV. c. 19.