An amercement is a financial penalty in English law, common during the Middle Ages, imposed either by the court or by peers.
An amercement is a financial penalty in English law, common during the Middle Ages, imposed either by the court or by peers.
While it is often synonymous with a fine, it differs in that a fine is a fixed sum prescribed by statute and was often voluntary, while an amercement is arbitrary. Amercements were commonly used as a punishment for minor offences (such as trespassing in the king's forest), as an alternative to imprisonment.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).