The Book-Hunter
inhabitants of the said city and counties, and all to the perpetual
diminution of all the Court Barons in the said counties, unless
convenient remedy be provided in this behalf. The foresaid Lord the
King, considering the premises, by the advice, assent, and authority
aforesaid, hath ordained and stablished that at all times, from
hencefort, there shall be but six common atturneys in the said county of
Norfolk, and six common atturneys in the said county of Suffolk, and two
common atturneys in the said city of Norwich, to be atturneys in the
Courts of Record."
FUSTIAN.--(11 Henry VII. c. 27.)
"Now so it is, that divers persons, by subtilty and undue sleights and
means, have deceivably imagined and contrived instruments of iron, with
the which irons, in the most highest and secret places of their houses,
they strike and draw the said irons over the said fustians unshorn; by
means whereof they pluck off both the nap and cotton of the same
fustians, and break commonly both the ground and threeds in sunder, and
after by crafty sleeking, they make the same fustians to appear to the
common people fine, whole, and sound: and also they raise up the cotton
of such fustians, and then take a light candle and set it in the fustian
burning, which sindgeth and burneth away the cotton of the same fustian
from the one end to the other down to the hard threeds, in stead of
shering, and after that put them in colour, and so subtilly dress them
that their false work cannot be espied without it be by workmen sherers
of such fustians, or by the wearers of the same, and so by such
subtilties, whereas fustians made in doublets or put to any other use,
were wont and might endure the space of two years and more, will not
endure now whole by the space of four months scarcely, to the great hurt
of the poor commons and serving men of this realm, to the great damage,
loss, and deceit of the King's true subjects, buyers and wearers of such
fustians," &c.
The history of statute-making is not absolutely divested of pleasantry.
The best tradition connected with it at present arising in the memory is
not to be brought to book, and must be given as a tradition of the time
when George III. was king. Its tenor is, that a bill which proposed, as
the punishment of an offence, to levy a certain pecuniary penalty, one
half thereof to go to his Majesty and the other half to the informer,
was altered in committee, in so far that, when it appeared in the form
of an act, _the punishment_ was changed to whipping and imprisonment,
_the destination_ being left unaltered.
It is wonderful that such mistakes are not of frequent occurrence when
one remembers the hot hasty work often done by committees, and the
complex entanglements of sentences on which they have to work.[48]
Bentham was at the trouble of counting the words in one sentence of an
Act of Parliament, and found that, beginning with "Whereas" and ending
with the word "repealed," it was precisely the length of an ordinary
three-volume novel. To offer the reader that sentence on the present
occasion would be rather a heavy jest, and as little reasonable as the
revenge offered to a village schoolmaster who, having complained that
the whole of his little treatise on the Differential Calculus was
printed bodily in one of the earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (not so profitable as the later), was told that he was
welcome, in his turn, to incorporate the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the
next edition of his little treatise.
[Footnote 48: A polite correspondent reminds me of the Registration Act,
52 G. III. c. 156, in which the fruit of penalties is divided between
the informer, who gets one half, and certain charitable purposes, to
which the other is devoted, while the only penalty set forth in the Act
is transportation for fourteen years.]
In the supposition, however, that there are few readers who, like Lord
King, can boast of having read the Statutes at large through, I venture
to give a title of an Act--a title only, remember, of one of the bundle
of acts passed in one session--as an instance of the comprehensiveness
of English statute law, and the lively way in which it skips from one
subject to another. It is called--
"An Act to continue several laws for the better regulating of pilots,
for the conducting of ships and vessels from Dover, Deal, and the Isle
of Thanet, up the River Thames and Medway; and for the permitting rum or
spirits of the British sugar plantations to be landed before the duties
of excise are paid thereon; and to continue and amend an Act for
preventing fraud in the admeasurement of coals within the city and
liberties of Westminster, and several parishes near thereunto; and to
continue several laws for preventing exactions of occupiers of locks and
wears upon the River Thames westward; and for ascertaining the rates of
water-carriage upon the said river; and for the better regulation and
government of seamen in the merchant service; and also to amend so much
of an Act made during the reign of King George I. as relates to the
better preservation of salmon in the River Ribble; and to regulate fees
in trials and assizes at nisi prius," &c.
But this gets tiresome, and we are only half way through the title after
all. If the reader wants the rest of it, as also the substantial Act
itself, whereof it is the title, let him turn to the 23d of Geo. II.,
chap. 26.
No wonder, if he anticipated this sort of thing, that Bacon should have
commended "the excellent brevity of the old Scots acts." Here, for
instance, is a specimen, an actual statute at large, such as they were
in those pigmy days:--
"Item, it is statute that gif onie of the King's lieges passes in
England, and resides and remains there against the King's will, he shall
be halden as Traiter to the King."
Here is another, very comprehensive, and worth a little library of
modern statute-books, if it was duly enforced:--
"Item, it is statute and ordained, that all our Sovereign lord's lieges
being under his obeisance, and especially the Isles, be ruled by our
Sovereign lord's own laws, and the common laws of the realm, and none
other laws."
The Irish statute-book conveys more expressively than any narrative the
motley contrasts of a history in the fabric of which the grotesque and
the tragic are so closely interwoven. So early as the middle of the
sixteenth century, English statesmen discover usquebaugh, and pass an
act to extinguish it at once: "forasmuch as _aqua vitae_, a drink nothing
profitable to be daily drunken and used, is now universally throughout
this realm of Ireland made, and especially in the borders of the
Irishry, and for the furniture of Irishmen, and thereby much corn,
grain, and other things are consumed, spent, and wasted," and so forth.
To get men to shave and wash themselves, and generally to conform to the
standard of civilisation in their day, seems innocent if not laudable;
yet is there a world of heartburning, strife, oppression, and
retaliatory hatred expressed in the title of "an act, that the Irishmen
dwelling in the counties of Dublin, Meath, Uriell, and Kildare, shall go
apparelled like Englishmen, and wear their beards after the English
manner, swear allegiance, and take English surnames." Further on we have
a whole series of acts, with a conjunction of epithets in their titles
which, at the present day, sounds rather startling, "for the better
suppressing Tories, Robbers, and Rapparees, and for preventing
robberies, burglaries, and other heinous crimes." The classes so
associated having an unreasonable dislike of being killed, difficulties
are thus put in the way of those beneficially employed in killing them,
insomuch that they, "upon the killing of any one of their number, are
thereby so alarmed and put upon their keeping, that it hath been found
impracticable for such person or persons to discover and apprehend or
kill any more of them, whereby they are discouraged from discovering and
apprehending or killing," and so forth. There is a strange and
melancholy historical interest in these grotesque enactments, since they
almost verbatim repeat the legislation about the Highland clans passed a
century earlier by the Lowland Parliament of Scotland.
There is one shelf of the law library laden with a store of which few
will deny the attractive interest--that devoted to the literature of
Criminal Trials. It will go hard indeed, if, besides the reports of mere
technicalities, there be not here some glimpses of the sad romances
which lie at their heart; and, at all events, when the page passes a
very slight degree beyond the strictly professional, the technicalities
will be found mingled with abundant narrative. The State Trials, for
instance--surely a lawyer's book--contains the materials of a thousand
romances: nor are these all attached to political offences; as,
fortunately, the book is better than its name, and makes a virtuous
effort to embrace all the remarkable trials coming within the long
period covered by the collection. Some assistance may be got, at the
same time, from minor luminaries, such as the Newgate Calendar--not to
be commended, certainly, for its literary merits, but full of matters
strange and horrible, which, like the gloomy forest of the Castle of
Indolence, "sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood."
There are many other books where records of remarkable crimes are mixed
up with much rubbish, as, The Terrific Register, God's Revenge against
Murder, a little French book called Histoire Generale des Larrons
(1623), and if the inquirer's taste turn towards maritime crimes, The
History of the Bucaniers, by Esquemeling. A little work in four
volumes, called the Criminal Recorder, by a student in the Inner Temple,
can be commended as a sort of encyclopaedia of this kind of literature.
It professes--and is not far from accomplishing the profession--to give
biographical sketches of notorious public characters, including
"murderers, traitors, pirates, mutineers, incendiaries, defrauders,
rioters, sharpers, highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, swindlers,
housebreakers, coiners, receivers, extortioners, and other noted persons
who have suffered the sentence of the law for criminal offences." By far
the most luxurious book of this kind, however, in the English language,
is Captain Johnston's Lives of Highwaymen and Pirates. It is rare to
find it now complete. The old folio editions have been often mutilated
by over use; the many later editions in octavo are mutilated by design
of their editors; and for conveying any idea of the rough truthful
descriptiveness of a book compiled in the palmy days of highway robbery,
they are worthless.
All our literature of that nature must, however, yield to the French
Causes Celebres, a term rendered so significant by the value and
interest of the book it names, as to have been borrowed by writers in
this country to render their works attractive. It must be noted as a
reason for the success of this work, and also of the German collection
by Feuerbach, that the despotic Continental method of procedure by
secret inquiry affords much better material for narrative than ours by
open trial. We make, no doubt, a great drama of a criminal trial.
Everything is brought on the stage at once, and cleared off before an
audience excited so as no player ever could excite; but it loses in
reading; while the Continental inquiry, with its slow secret development
of the plot, makes the better novel for the fireside.
There is a method by which, among ourselves, the trial can be imbedded
in a narrative which may carry down to later generations a condensed
reflection of that protracted expectation and excitement which disturb
society during the investigations and trials occasioned by any great