Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/193

 168

LEGAL VULGAR ERRORS. WHEN Sir Thomas Browne wrote his "Pseudodoxia Epidemica," or Vul gar Errors, he omitted altogether to take notice of an important class, viz., legal vulgar errors. As a physician, it was rather errors of natural history or science which exercised his mind, and he accordingly explodes with much abstruse learning such vulgar notions as that " the elephant hath no joints in his legs," that Jews stink, and that the chameleon lives only upon air. Yet as " there are waur lees than ithers," as the parish idiot in Ramsay's " Anecdotes " ob served, so there are errors and errors, and it is safer to indulge the innocent belief that an elephant has no joints or that " storks will only live in republics or free states," than the somewhat dangerous notions that you may keep what you find, or marry again if your husband or wife has been missing for seven years. The idea that an Englishman has a common law right to take his wife to market for sale with a halter round her neck now only lingers in the mind of the intelligent foreigner and some North-country miners, but the related super stition that a husband may beat or imprison his wife died hard only quite recently in the Jackson case. These, and a good many other vulgar legal errors, seem to be the shadows cast by traditional usage or obso lete statutes, such, for instance, as that bullbeef may not be sold unless the bull has first been baited; that no one may shoot a crow within five miles of London, or carry a dark lantern; or, more singular still, that the owner of an ass must crop its ears to prevent it frightening horses on the road. The idea that an heir could not be disin herited unless he was given a shilling still survives in the phrase being " cut off with a shilling." When Sheridan was threatened with this last extremity by an indignant

parent, he replied with characteristic cool ness, " You don't happen to have the shil ling about you, sir, do you?" This demand was premature : the said shilling need only (according to the vulgar view) be given by will. Wills themselves are the subject of a great deal of popular misconception; for instance, one very common mistake is that the destruction of a will revoking a former one revives the earlier will. This is a very fatal error, as fatal as that pride of knowl edge which leads makers of " oleograph" wills, as a country solicitor once called them, to talk about " heirs " when they mean "next of kin," and " demising," when they mean " devising." One widespread fallacy is that a trespasser is liable to prosecution. It is small blame to people that this should be believed, because they are confronted at every turn from their infancy upwards by boards threatening prosecution and the severest penalties of the law to the tres passer. It requires a daring originality and great firmness of mind to take in the idea that such a notice board is nothing but a "wooden lie," and the severest penalties of the law a civil action for nominal damages. Landowners would seem, in putting up such notices, to act on the principle of Sir Arthur Heveningham. This gentleman, according to the " Camden Anecdotes," "being informed of some abuse of his liberties by a saucy, impudent fellow, he vowed and threatened such a kind of pun ishment presently as was not very legal, whereupon a friend of his prompted him of the danger of such unwarrantable proceed ing as the letter .of the law would not bear. ' Oh! pox on't,' says he, ' in cases of this nature we must not be so nice and scrupu lous; lett's doe something bylaw and some thing by presumption too.'" A very common form of popular fallacy