Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 35

The next year (1285) saw an astonishing series of epoch-making statutes. Of these the first was the second Statute of Westminster, which leaves hardly a single department of the law untouched. Of its fifty chapters, the first is the famous De Donis of which we shall have much to say later on, for it lies at the foundation of the idea of legal estates in land. Among many others are the following important provisions. The common mode of fraudulently conveying land by allowing judgment to go by default in a collusive action brought for the purpose was checked (c. 4).¹ The rights of joint-tenants and reversioners were given more prompt protection in such cases, and it was enacted that this device should not bar a widow’s claim to dower. By chapter 11 a very stringent process was created for the action of account. In its origin it dealt with the relationship of the lord of a manor to his bailiff or estate manager, but as history proceeds it becomes a commercial as well as a feudal action, and the regular remedy lying between partners. The statute imposes imprisonment as soon as an accountant is found in default, and this penalty can be inflicted by the lord’s auditors without the intervention of a court. Equally drastic is the penalty upon the sheriff or gaoler if such a prisoner escapes, for in such a case the gaoler shall be liable to the lord in the same sum as the accountant was. This perhaps is a reflection of the insecurity of mediaeval prisons, which were by no means so massive as is sometimes thought. Chapter 18 established the writ of elegit whereby a judgment creditor could, as an alternative to the old fieri facias, elect to take all the debtor’s chattels and to hold half of his lands until the debt be levied out of the chattels and the rent.