The English, blinded with superstition, instead of being shocked with this inhumanity, exclaimed that the misfortunes of Edwy and his consort were a just judgment for their dissolute contempt of the ecclesiastical statutes.

[b] were an essential part; and it is also evident, from the tenour of those ancient laws, that the Wittenagemot enacted statutes which regulated the ecclesiastical as well as civil government, and that those dangerous principles, by which the church is totally severed from the state, were hitherto unknown to the Anglo-Saxons

[d], were admitted into this council, and gave their consent to the public statutes.

There were few or no taxes imposed by the states; there were few statutes enacted; and the nation was less governed by laws than by customs, which admitted a great latitude of interpretation.

In all extensive governments, where the execution of the laws is feeble, this power naturally falls into the hands of the principal nobility; and the degree of it which prevails cannot be determined so much by the public statutes, as by small incidents in history, by particular customs, and sometimes by the reason and nature of things.

In 1362 Parliament enacted that English should thereafter be used in law courts, "because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed, and judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the said realm.

In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic religion, Charles II. suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy; Bunyan was thereupon released from jail.

The administration of justice was frequently interrupted by the want of integrity in the Pundits, or expounders of the statutes.

Many of them were versed in the scientific and historical basis of property, they knew that the friars by their own statutes could not own property, but they also knew that to come from far across the sea with an appointment secured with great difficulty, to undertake the duties of the position with the best intentions, and now to lose it because an Indian fancied that justice had to be done on earth as in heaventhat surely was an idea!

Sometimes both parties themselves are not agreed: parents, tutors, masters, guardians, will not give consent; laws, customs, statutes hinder: poverty, superstition, fear and suspicion: many men dote on one woman, semel et simul: she dotes as much on him, or them, and in modesty must not, cannot woo, as unwilling to confess as willing to love: she dare not make it known, show her affection, or speak her mind.

But man alone, alas the hard stond, Full cruelly by kinds ordinance Constrained is, and by statutes bound, And debarred from all such pleasance: What meaneth this, what is this pretence Of laws, I wis, against all right of kinde Without a cause, so narrow men to binde?

A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable.

SEE Federal statutes annotated; supplement, 1922.

"Technically it is an oral will, operating on personality only, made in extremisthat is, actually in fear of deathand under our statutes limited to soldiers in active military service or to mariners at sea.

"We have strict statutes, and most biting laws.

"The more statutes you pass the more it indicates that you need 'em.

What keeps most people straight is not criminal statutes but their own sense of decency, conscience or whatever you may choose to call it.

"Yet," her employer continued, "unfortunatelyor perhaps fortunately from our professional point of viewour lawmakers from time to time get rather hysterical and pass such a multiplicity of statutes that nobody knows whether he is committing crime or not.

"Do you know that last year alone to interpret all those statutes and decide the respective rights of our citizens the Supreme Court of this state wrote five thousand eight hundred pages of opinion?" "Good Lord!"

" "Why, the more statutes you pass and more new crimes you create the harder it becomes to enforce obedience to them, until finally you can't enforce them at all.

"Passing statutes creating new crimes is like printing paper money without anything back of it; in the one case there isn't really any more money than there was before and in the other there isn't really any more crime either.

Not because it means progress or any bunk like that, but because unless you had a certain amount of crime, and also criminal lawyers to attack the law, the state would never find out the weaknesses in its statutes.

Cf. provisions of the statutes 5 Eliz.

Edmund Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, or the Statutes, Constitutions (etc.) of the Church of England, ii (1713), 998.

Mr. Prothero has conveniently gathered some, with references to others, in his Statutes and Constitutional Documents (1st ed.), pp.