The Law's Lumber Room

A series of essays surveys obsolete English legal practices and curious statutes, tracing origins, procedures, and social implications of measures such as benefit of clergy, peine forte et dure, fines and recoveries, manorial customs, deodands, forest law, the John Doe and Richard Roe fiction, sanctuary, trial by ordeal, wager of battle, press gangs, and sumptuary laws. The writer explains how religious privilege, medieval procedure, and piecemeal reform produced paradoxes and cruelties, highlights tests like the literacy-based neck-verse, branding, and judicial fictions, and reflects on the tension between picturesque antiquity and later practical changes in the legal system.