Very profound legal studies, therefore, cannot be predicated of Shakespeare on the ground of the knowledge which he has shown of this peculiar kind of statute.

It is not surprising that both our legal Shakespearean commentators cite the following passage from “As You Like It” in support of their theory; for in it the word “extent” is used in a sense so purely technical, that not one in a thousand of Shakespeare’s lay readers now-a-days would understand it without a note:—­

Duke F. Well, push him out of doors, And let my officers of such a nature Make an extent upon his house and lands.”  Act iii.  Sc. 1.

“Extent,” as Mr. Rushton remarks, is directed to the sheriff to seize and value lands and goods to the utmost extent; “an extendi facias” as Lord Campbell authoritatively says, “applying to the house and lands as a fieri facias would apply to goods and chattels, or a capias ad satisfaciendum to the person.”  But that John Fletcher knew, as well as my Lord Chief Justice, or Mr. Barrister Rushton, or even, perhaps, William Shakespeare, all the woes that followed an extent, the elder Mr. Weller at least would not have doubted, had he in the course of his literary leisure fallen upon the following passage in “Wit Without Money” (1630):—­

“Val Mark me, widows Are long extents in law upon men’s livings, Upon their bodies’ winding-sheets; they that enjoy ’em Lie but with dead men’s monuments, and beget Only their own ill epitaphs.”  Act ii.  Sc. 2.

George Wilkins, too, the obscure author of “The Miseries of Enforced Marriage,” uses the term with as full an understanding, though not with so feeling an expression or so scandalous an illustration of it, in the following passage from the fifth act of that play, which was produced about 1605 or 1606:—­

“They are usurers; they come yawning for money; and the sheriff with them is come to serve an extent upon your land, and then seize your body by force of execution.”

Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances of it, is “taken with the manner.”  This has nothing to do with good manners or ill manners; but, in the words of the old law-book before cited,—­

—­“is when a theefe hath stollen and is followed with hue and crie and taken, having that found about him which he stole;—­that is called ye maynour.  And so we commonly use to saye, when wee finde one doing of an unlawful act, that we tooke him with the maynour or manner.”

Termes de la Ley, 1595, fol. 126, b.

Shakespeare, therefore, uses the phrase with perfect understanding, when he makes Prince Hal say to Bardolph,—­

“O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen years ago, and wert taken with the manner, and ever since thou hast blush’d extempore.” 1 Henry IV.Act ii, Sc. 4.

But so Fletcher uses the same phrase, and as correctly, when he makes Perez say to Estefania, in “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,”—­