The Law's Lumber Room. further evidence that the Merry Monarch's Parliament ordered all shrouds for the dead to be of woolen, which order undoubtedly made the Pope of poets put into the mouth of the dying Narcissa the lines :— Odious in woollen? 'twould a saint provoke : — let charming silk and Brussels lace Wrap my cold limbs and hide my lifeless face.
But the statute respecting woollen shrouds was repealed in 181 4, and thereafter Narcissa's burial recipe was free to be copied by undertakers. Lingerers in the purlieus of this legal lumber room already fear that Congress and legislatures are fain to ex hume for models some of these sumptuary hangings. Blood red are the figures of " wager of battle " on other tapestries mouldering here in the dust of ages. These were instigated by the joust fashions of the age of chivalry. Old English law books tell us all about the "trial by battel " between litigants : and Chaucers " Knight's Tale " in the elaborate set-to between Palamon and Arcite gives the poetic side of that primitive mode of trial, most usual between suitors for recover ing land. In 18 19 came the repeal of the Appeal of Murder Act and then wagef of battle entered the law's lumber room. That repeal came after one Abram Thornton was accused in May, 181 7, at the Warwick shire Assizes, of the murder of Mary Ashford, and duly tried and acquitted; but her relatives, instructed by an attorney versed in mediaeval law, appealed Thornton into the King's Bench for wager of battle, her brother volunteering to oppose in the battle. Attached thereinto by the perplexed law officers he threw down glove on the West minster court floor, and pleaded "not guilty
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and am ready to defend the same by my body." The arguments concerning this repolishing of what had been thought to be legal lumber are in the King's Bench reports of A.U. 181 8. In the dilemma of either having trial by battle revived so soon after Waterloo, or of letting Thornton go free of the vengeance of his victim's family, the home office set the re-accused at liberty, and hence Parliament remitted wage of battle to the law's lumber room. In which appropriately also lie the witchery and ethical statutes of the Bay Colony along with a copy of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter " as illustration. There too are what are termed the blue laws of old Connecticut. Fines and recoveries, mort mains, forfeitures by the score, frank pledges, star chamber rules, racks and thumb screws and much indefinable legal lumber called Deodands, or trials by ordeals of fire and water are also clogging the law's lumber rooms. Heaps of reversed cases by courts are therein piled together with dis carded methods and antiquated text books. Many of the confessions of John Doe and some autobiography of Richard Roe are there. Indeed, large bits of laymen's sar casm at the law will be found amid the rubbish of that lumber room, although the sarcasms are colloquially but mistakenly believed by many — dramatists and fiction writers especially — to be aimed at fully existent evils. Over its doorway might be placed as motto the line from Poe's "Raven" about "forgotten lore." As an old bar couplet runs : — Thou thinks't it law which now you quote, 'tis not; But only lore by lawyers long forgot.
