they should be understood to remain in force. Great care is evidently necessary not to force them upon transactions which, if the meaning of the rule is to be observed, ought really to be exceptions." Maxim-Nordenfelt Co. v. Nordenfelt (1893), I Ch. 631. Lord Bowen vitalized and enforced his exposition of legal principles by reference to history. "The only reasonable and the only satisfactory way of dealing with English law," he once said, "is to bring to bear upon it the historical method. Mere legal termi nology may seem a dead thing. Mix history with it and it clothes itself with life. In his brilliant application of this method he avoided many of the errors which have re sulted from the attempt to give a rational or scientific basis to doctrines which owe their origin to historical accidents. A brief quota tion from his opinion in a nisi prius action for illegal distraint, in which it was claimed that the landlord had broken an outer door, will illustrate his use of the historical method: "The doctrine of the inviolability of the outer doors of a house and its precinct has long been established by 'English law. The principle is one which carries us back in imagination to wilder times, when the outer door of a house, or the outer gates and en closures of land, were an essential protection, not merely against fraud, but violence. The proposition that a man's house is his castle, which was crystallized into a maxim by the judgment in Semavne's case, and by Lord Coke, dates back to days far earlier still, when it was recognized as a limitation im posed by law on all process except that which was pursued at the King's suit and in his name. A landlord's right to distrain for arrears of rent is itself only a survival of one among a multitude of distraints which, both in England and other countries, belonged to a primitive period when legal procedure still retained some of the germs of a semi-barbar ous custom of reprisals, of which instances abound in the early English books, and in the Irish Senchus Мог. Later, all creditors and all aggrieved persons who respected the
King's peace, the sheriff in a civil suit and the landlord in pursuit of his private remedy for rent and services, were both of them held at bay by a bolted door or barred gate. To break open either was to deprive the owner of protection against the outer world for his family, his goods and furniture and his cattle." American Must Corp. r. Hendry, 62 L. J., Q. B. 389. Lord Bowen 's subtle intellect could not have made him the great judge that he was had it not been balanced by good sense. He was continually using the terms common law and common sense as equivalents; he likened the common law to an "arsenal of sound common sense principles." A multitude of illustrations might be given. One will suf fice. In speaking of the standard to be used in weighing the evidence as to whether a certain hospital was an "annoyance" to neighboring inhabitants, he said: "'Annoyance' is a wider term than nui sance, and if you find a thing which really troubles the mind and pleasure, not of a fanciful person or of a skilled person who knows the truth, but of the ordinary sensible English inhabitant of a house,—if you find there is anything which disturbs his reason able peace of mind, that seems to me to he an annoyance, although it may not appear to amount to physical detriment or discomfort. You must take sensible people; you must not take fanciful people on the one side or skilled people on the other; and that is the key as it seems to me of this case. Doctors may be able to say, and, for anything I know, to say with certainty, that there is no sort of danger from this hospital to the surrounding neigh borhood. But the fact that some doctors think there is, makes it evident at all events that it is not a very unreasonable thing for persons of ordinary apprehension to be troubled in their minds about it. And if it is not an unreasonable thing for any ordinary person who lives in the neighborhood to be troubled in his mind by the apprehension of such risk, it seems to me that there is danger of annoyance, though there may not
