who died passing through the kingdom were seized by the authorities and could not be recovered by his heirs.  This mediaeval injustice continued for some centuries in Germany and France, and we can hardly say that the notion is extinct in this country when a State like California, by her system of public administrators, practically impounds a large proportion of all personal property owned by non-residents at their death.  Cases have been known where it cost the executor more than one-third of the money to collect a mortgage, owned by a deceased citizen of Massachusetts, in California; and for that reason, among others, Eastern lawyers have advised against investments in that State; for the public administrators are usually petty politicians in search of a job.  The increasing burden of our State inheritance tax laws, whereby every State wherein a corporation exists besides the State of the deceased seizes its percentage of the stock of such corporation in the hands of the executors, is another step in this direction.  This early Statute Merchant, liberal in other respects, still excludes Jews from its benefits.

(1284) Jury trial was well established by this time, for the Statute of Wales includes it in its code of procedure for that principality.  The great Statute De Donis, or Westminster II, came the following year; most interesting to lawyers as the foundation of estates tail; but it also regulates “assizes or juries” that “rich men do not abide at home by reason of their bribes.”  It also specifically requires indictment “of twelve lawful men at least,” and gives an action against sheriffs imprisoning without such warrant “as they should have against any other person.”  Rape, ten years before made punishable only by two years’ imprisonment, is now made an offence punishable by loss of life or member; showing how our ancestors treated a burning question, at least in our Southern States, of to-day.  Finally, it confirms and explains the writ de odio et atia, the predecessor of the modern habeas corpus.  Some writers have doubted whether this writ existed as a practical remedy much before the Statute of Charles II; but here it says that parties indicted, etc., are to have the writ de odio et atia “lest they be kept long in prison, like as it is declared in Magna Charta.”  This can only refer to C. 36 of John’s Charter, “the writ of inquest of life or limb to be given gratis and not denied”; and taken in connection with the action for damages just given affords a fairly complete safeguard to personal liberty.  It also contains the first game law, protecting “salmons.”  “There are salmons in Wye,” says Shakespeare, and we are reminded of it because the Statute of Winchester in the same year contains a provision that is almost literally quoted by Dogberry in “Twelfth Night.”  It provides for the gates of great towns to be shut at sunset, and that no citizen should bear arms, and no tavern sell drink after 9 P.M., and then it comes