Frederick Richard Wilson

“ No one was to conceal a hawk: if they did so, they were to pay the value of it, and suffer two years’ imprisonment; and if they were not able to pay the price of the hawk, they were to be detained in prison a longer time. Every freeman was to have his honey that was found in the forest, also his “ayries of hawks, eagles, and herons.” ”

“ A study of the law is commonly accepted as the driest, dullest, most monotonous investigation the mind can make. The speculations of antiquaries concerning dinted weapons, broken ware, or battered coins, are considered fascinating when compared to the dingy, heavy web of the law. No one takes up a law-book for leisure perusal: no one studies the law as a leisure pursuit. ”

“ We will quote the abstract of a statute made by King James the First:
“No innkeeper, victualler, or alehouse keeper, shall suffer any town-dwellers to sit tippling in his house, on pain of 10sh., nor sell less than a full alequart of the best ale or beer, or two quarts of the small, for one penny, in pain of 20sh. And here the view of one justice, or proof by two witnesses upon oath before one justice is sufficient conviction.” ”

“ We close the book of abstracts of the early statutes, as the six men would close the city gate, knowing that we have but to open it again to stand in the midst of the flow of the quaint, earnest, picturesque life of the middle ages. ”

“ Candles were useful in another way besides for lighting. A sale “by inch of candle” was a common proceeding. When the goods of a merchant, or of a company, were sold in lots, the time of bidding for each lot was confined to the period in which a small piece of wax candle kept a-light; when it went out the lot was the purchase of the last bidder. Such a sale must have been a Rembrandtish sight,—the earnest faces of the merchants, in their settings of long locks and vandyked collars, alternately obscured and garishly revealed as the candle flickered in its socket. ”

“ An Elizabethan statute gives us a category of the persons we might expect to meet on a highway, or skulking along the narrow streets under the shadows of the gabled houses. Her legislators speak of scholars (!) and seafaring men who beg; of wandering persons who either beg or use unlawful games and plays, or feign themselves to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or the like, or pretend to tell fortunes ”

“ No one might practise any “art or mystery” who had not properly served an apprenticeship to it. To maintain a requisite balance no one was allowed to keep more than three apprentices without employing a journeyman. ”

“ It is somewhat the fashion in the nineteenth century to laud the works of its own time as being without precedent except in the history of the ancient world; but as we scan the mottled pages of the book of abstracts, we are struck with the magnitude of the engineering enterprises of the days to which it relates. ”

“ Elizabeth supplemented these regulations with additional severities, declaring that if any subject of hers consorted with Egyptians for the space of a month he should be adjudged a felon, without clergy.
There are two or three clues running through the labyrinth of ancient legislation, whose course can be clearly traced in successive centuries. One of these is a strong determination to maintain the commercial isolation of Britain: a second is an early recognition of the advantages of division of labour. ”

“ A peer of the realm, being sent for by the king, in coming and returning, may kill a deer or two in the forest through which he passeth: howbeit it must not be done privily, but by the view of the Forester, if present ”

“ Henry VIII. had previously enacted that no one was to pollute the Thames—an enactment which might have saved many lives if it had been enforced—and Elizabeth had further ensured the well-watering of London by making the River Lea navigable as far up as Ware. The 6000 acres of land recovered in the Isle of Ely were increased by 95,000 additional acres in the time of Charles II. Many Acts tell of structural operations—when bridges were built, when groups of decayed houses were repaired; when new houses were built on waste lands ”

“ Henry VI. decreed that if any persons calling themselves Egyptians came into his realm they should forfeit all their goods, and be thrown into prison if they did not depart immediately they were commanded to do so. Philip and Mary took additional precautions to prevent the landing of the swarthy strangers:
“None shall transport any lewd people who call themselves Egyptians into this realm or Wales, in pain of 40l. ”

“ Merchants, mercers, drapers, goldsmiths, ironmongers, embroiderers and clothiers dwelling in corporate towns, in Tudor times, were allowed to take no apprentices, except their own children, whose parents were not possessed of freehold property to the value of 40s. ”