A culprit, under English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

 properly the prison

Prison

A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

er at the bar, is one accused of a crime

Crime

Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...

. The term is used, generally, of one guilty

Guilty

Guilty commonly refers to the feeling of guilt, an experience that occurs when a person believes that they have violated a moral standard.Guilty or The Guilty may also refer to:-Law:*Guilty plea, a formal admission of legal culpability...

 of an offence. In origin

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 the word is a combination of two Anglo-French

Anglo-Norman language

Anglo-Norman is the name traditionally given to the kind of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period....

 legal words, culpable: guilty, and prit or prest: Old French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

: ready. On the prisoner at the bar pleading not guilty, the clerk of the crown answered culpable, and states that he was ready (prest) to join issue. The words "cul. prist" were then entered on the roll, showing that issue had been joined. When French law terms were discontinued, the words were taken as forming one word addressed to the prisoner.

The formula "Culprit, how will you be tried?" in answer to a plea of "not guilty," is first found in the trial for murder of the 7th Earl of Pembroke

Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke

Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, 4th Earl of Montgomery was an English nobleman who succeeded to the titles and estates of two earldoms on 8 July 1674 on the death of his brother William Herbert, 6th Earl of Pembroke...

 in 1678.
Under modern criminal law

Criminal law

Criminal law, is the body of law that relates to crime. It might be defined as the body of rules that defines conduct that is not allowed because it is held to threaten, harm or endanger the safety and welfare of people, and that sets out the punishment to be imposed on people who do not obey...

, the preferred term is defendant

Defendant

A defendant or defender is any party who is required to answer the complaint of a plaintiff or pursuer in a civil lawsuit before a court, or any party who has been formally charged or accused of violating a criminal statute...

.