Commentaries on the Laws of England

“Personal actions are such whereby a man claims a debt, or personal duty, or damages in lieu thereof;

(2) H was entitled during coverture to the whole of W’s income from whatever source it came, e.

The word bailiff is of Norman origin, and was applied in England, at an early period, (after the example, it is said, of the French,) to the chief magistrates of counties, or shires, such as the alderman, the reeve, or sheriff, and also of inferior jurisdictions, such as hundreds and wapentakes.

There was much to be learnt (as there still is) from Blackstone, whose work was admirable in its day, notwithstanding conspicuous faults of method and arrangement mostly not his own;

‘The conveyance of copyhold estates is usually made from the seller to the lord or his steward by delivery of a rod or verge, and then from the lord to the purchaser by redelivery of the same in the presence of a jury of tenants,’ Blackstone, 2, 20.

“the leaving indefinite the number of the knights and the justices of assize, the abolishing of the election of the former, and the reducing the times of taking assizes to once in every year.

an attempt of which Blackstone tells us for the credit of enlightened eighteenth-century practice as he knew it, but in words including some express apology and much implied admission.

Nay, those very subtleties of old English law which, as Blackstone says, made the taking of distress ‘a hazardous sort of proceeding’ to the civil distrainor, might bring an Irishman to the gallows, if in conscientiously attempting to carry out the foreign law he fell into the smallest mistake.

“Those rights then which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are;

Blackstone has treated of “The rights of persons, and the rights of things;

Blackstone 301 and 321.

In the quaint and childlike words of Blackstone, Susan “finds a thousand obstacles in her way-shame, remorse, the constraint of her sex, and the rigor of laws—that stifle her inclinations to perform this duty;