impeachment

The word impeachment traces through Anglo-French empeechement from Old French empeschier, which meant to hinder or obstruct. That verb came from Late Latin impedicare, built on pes, the Latin word for foot, and pedica, meaning fetter or shackle. The original image was entirely physical: to impede someone was to catch them by the foot, preventing forward movement. English borrowed the legal sense from French court proceedings by the late 14th century.

The first major parliamentary impeachment in England came in 1376, during the Good Parliament, when the Commons charged William Latimer, the royal chamberlain, with misusing his office and enriching himself at public expense. This was a constitutional innovation: the House of Commons acting as prosecutor before the House of Lords as judge. The mechanism gave Parliament a way to hold ministers accountable without requiring the king's direct cooperation.

English common law refined the process through the following centuries. The most prominent Stuart-era impeachment was that of Francis Bacon in 1621, who admitted to accepting gifts from litigants while serving as Lord Chancellor and was stripped of his offices. The procedure reached its greatest theoretical scope when Edmund Burke prosecuted Warren Hastings over seven years for alleged abuses as Governor-General of India, ending in acquittal in 1795.

American founders borrowed impeachment directly from English parliamentary practice when drafting the Constitution in 1787. Alexander Hamilton defended it in Federalist No. 65 as the proper remedy for those who abuse a public trust, noting that the injuries involved the whole community rather than private individuals. The word arrived in Philadelphia carrying its full Latin history: to impeach a president is still, in its oldest layer, to shackle someone by the foot and demand an accounting.