Barbarous Legal Customs. unwilling to allow the right, especially in a case of such atrocity, were obliged to admit that it was still legal; and as it would have been the height of madness in Ashford to accept the challenge of one so much his su perior in bodily strength, the murderer was suffered to depart without further molesta tion. This occurred in the year 1818. This practice would certainly not have continued so long the letter of the law if the good sense of the nation had not practically discontinued it when the court of chiv alry was in its palmy days. Circumstances must, indeed, have frequently occurred to show its utter absurdity. Barrington, in his comments on the Statute, quotes from Graf ton's " Chronicle " a story of a citizen of Lon don in the time of Henry VI., who was very tall and strong but a great coward, while his opponent was very short and weak, but whose courage was as great as his body was small. The big man's friends fearing that his little modicum of courage might ooze like Acre's through the points of his fingers on the day of trial, determined to brace him up, and so dosed him with wine that his diminutive an tagonist threw him down with ease and beat away until the judges decided the cause in his favor. In the reign of Henry VIII., Richard Rose, a cook, was boiled to death in Smithfield, for poisoning several persons in the family of the Bishop of Rochester; an expost facto act
49 1
had been passed for this purpose. In 1541 Margaret Davy suffered a " similar death" in Smithfield for poisoning three families with whom she had livedCould anything exceed the barbarity of the old punishment of traitors, who were hanged, cut down alive, disembowelled while still living, and then quartered. This sen tence was only humanized in the time of George III., by the exertions of Sir Samuel Romilly, which were for a long time baffled by the protest of the crown officers that he was breaking down '* the bulwarks of the Constitution." Burning females to death for the crimes of petty and high treason contin ued to be practised until a comparatively recent date. The law of imprisonment for debt, which prevailed so long in England, is perhaps the most irrational that ever existed; even the ancient law which made the debtor the slave of the creditor, far excelled it, for by com pulsory service the slave might work off his debt, or at least in part; but by the other process this was simply impossible. The purposeless cruelty of imprisonment for debt was demonstrated in 1792, when a woman died in Devon gaol, afterforty-five years' im prisonment for a debt of .£19. And when the Thatched House Society set to work to ransom honest debtors by paying their debts, they in twenty years released 12,590 at a cost of 45J. per head.
