It is the glory of English Law, that its roots are sunk deep into the soil of national history; that it is the slow product of the age long growth of the national life.

First in point of time and interest comes the mortgage debt, i.e. the claim for the return of money lent on the security of some tangible object. Such claims are among the earliest fruits of a commercial civilization, and are nearly always affected the same way, viz. by the deposit or pledge of the security with the creditor, to be redeemed or returned on the payment of the debt.

The man who has been wounded by a chance arrow must not shoot at sight the first man he happens to meet.

Whatever else the Norman Conquest may or may not have done, it made the old haphazard state of legal affairs forever impossible.

But then a daring evasion by a leading conveyancer, known as the Lease and Release, received judicial sanction; and commenced a successful career of more than 200 years. The Lease and Release, attributed to Serjeant Moore, was based on the fact that the Statute of Inrolments did not apply to terms of years.

The thegn who deems an unjust doom is to lose his thegnship. It is a principle which can be widely applied

But we remember that it was just precisely in the reign of Richard II that the Peasants' War, following upon the changes wrought by the visitations of the Great Plague, virtually destroyed serfdom as a personal status.