halfpenny. Hogarth's picture represents the truth. They were days when men were drawn to death on sledges; when the bodies of murderers were exposed to the gaze of the galleries in Surgeons' Hall, attached to the Old Bailey; while men like Titus Oates, convicted of perjury, were stuck up in the pillory; when malefactors were hanged in chains at crossroads, and the boatmen on the Thames were accustomed to the sight on every headland of corpses in various stages of decomposition swinging in the breeze. Such were the horrors of the landscape in " Mer rie England " in the days of Shake speare and Bacon, and even as late as those of Pope and Burke and Wilberforce and Hannah Moore. It is quite clear that the common law in itself was not a savage or a sanguinary code, if we take into con sideration its an WILLIAM cient origin, and the barbarism of the tribes among whom it prevailed. The term " felony " originally comprised every species of crime which occasioned the forfeiture of lands and goods. At common law, in addition to the crimes coming strictly under the head of treason, the chief, if not the only felonies, were murder, manslaughter, arson, burglary, robbery, rape, sodomy, mayhem, and larceny. The punishment of these, where the offender could not claim the benefit of clergy, was death by hanging,
forfeiture of lands and goods, and corrup tion of blood. The benefit of 'clergy was not permitted to high treason nor to misde meanors, and in the former the death pen alty was added to by the sentence that the felon should be drawn and quartered and, sometimes, burnt. In discussing capital punishments, that great master of crown law, Sir Matthew Hale, dwelt upon t h e punishments inflicted by the laws of several countries, especial ly in the two of fenses of homicide and theft, which he stated were the most common and obvious. He makes it very plain that, among the Saxons, the punishment of homicide was not always for the most part capital, for it might be redeemed by recompense. It went under the name of "Wera" and " Weregild," which was a rate set down upon the heads of persons PRYNNE. of several ranks; and if any of them were killed, the offender was to make good that rate to the kindred of the party slain. This custom continued even to the time of Henry I., but shortly after grew obsolete, as being contradictory to the Divine law,r that "Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." More recent studies in the law of crimes have resulted in the discovery that it was a general practice of most of the Northern nations to commute the punishment of the
