Quaint olde English laws

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London’s Millennium Bridge needed some work recently–some cleaning, some urgent repair, a good tooth brushing–and an ancient bylaw required the contractor to dangle a bale of hay over the side of the bridge to warn boats that the headroom had been reduced. 

How ancient is the bylaw? No one’s saying, but the contractor modernized the tradition by adding a light at night. Couldn’t do that in the old days. The hay would’ve caught on fire. 

News articles are talking about it all as one of London’s charming quirks, but what strikes me as far stranger is that five of the Thames river crossings are maintained not by local government but by a 900-year-old charity, which is British for a nonprofit organization. 

But any discussion of quaint bylaws leads, naturally enough, to quaint ordinary laws, and England does a flourishing trade in quaint. Let’s review a handful.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise behind the village shop.

In England, it’s illegal to:

  • Wear armor in Parliament. 
    • A recent article about fashion–I usually skip those but by the end of the sentence you’ll see why this caught my eye–tells me that chainmail is a hot look this season, giving us chainmail-look dresses, miniskirts, tops, and unspecified menswear. “Chainmail is sexy,” someone or other is quoted as saying.  
      • I’m pretty sure you still can’t wear it in Parliament.
  • Walk a cow through the streets between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
  • Be drunk in a pub. 
    • To be fair, the law bundles this together with being drunk in other public places, but pubs are the only places on the list that sell alcohol.
  • Be drunk when in charge of a cow, which neatly combines the two previous laws.
  • Cause a nuclear explosion, although who’ll be around to enforce that isn’t clear.  
  • Take off your black cocked hat at a ceremonial event, but only if a) you’re a woman, b) you’re a Thetford town councillor, c) it’s before 2016, and d) you don’t have the mayor’s permission. 
    • That was a loosening of the rules. Women used to have to keep the hats on, no matter what the god, the mayor, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas said. A whole different set of rules applied to men–of course.  

This doesn’t fit my nifty  it’s-illegal-to formula, but cab drivers are required to ask passengers if they have either the plague or smallpox. And that dates back only to 1936. I’m not clear what the driver’s supposed to do if the passenger says yes, but as a former cab driver, my impulse would be to get the hell out of there. Compassionate cab drivers do exist, but the job doesn’t push a person toward compassion.

Cab drivers are also forbidden to transport rabid dogs or corpses, and I’d like to put it on record that I never broke that law. And was never asked to. 

In another interpretation of the plague-or-smallpox law, the onus is on the passenger to tell the driver if he or she has the plague or smallpox–or any other notifiable disease. 

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I doubt anyone other than me cares about the odd spacing between paragraphs. I’m sure there’s some way to control it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

44 thoughts on “Quaint olde English laws”

    • I doubt anyone ever needed a law against that. If you can get the cow through the door in the first place–drunk or sober–you’d never get served, which sort of defeats the purpose of going to the pub.

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  2. I haven’t taken many taxis, but I can confidently state that I have never been asked whether I have the plague or smallpox by a cabbie. Does this mean that I’ve had the misfortune to be driven by the very small number of cabbies that break that particular law, or are many more cabbies part of the criminal underworld?

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  4. You’re supposed to be allowed to shoot any Welsh person found in Chester after dark. With a crossbow. The police insist that you aren’t – although, to be fair, I don’t think anyone’s tried it for 600 years – but it’s one of those things that everyone in North West England “knows”.

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    • Another rumor has it that any pregnant woman has the right to demand to pee in a policeman’s hat. Sadly, I don’t think anyone’s been able to verify that, and if anyone’s tried claiming her rights I haven’t heard about it.

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  8. Somehow the ‘law’ is never as quite up-to-date as it likes to think it is. :D … re the paragraphs annoyance – my blog automatically inserts an extra space between paragraphs, but if I don’t want that to happen, I do this … ‘shift’ + ‘enter’ … and the text just keeps on doing what text does when typed by them’s wot consider themselves writers. :D … hope this helps. :D

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  10. So if your cow wants to shop or visit restaurants it’s out of luck. What interesting discussion must have been held upon instituting those laws. I wonder if any people were ever prosecuted.

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    • Given what restaurants tend to cook, I’d encourage my cow to stay away from them. If, of course, I had a cow. I’m up to my eyeballs with two cats and a dog, though. I think I’ll stop there.

      I don’t know if anyone was ever prosecuted, and I’d love to have heard the discussions that led to those laws. I can’t hellp imagining that it all seemed perfectly obvious what needed to be done–but in response to what?

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  11. Regarding spacing and other layout
    First, I can assure you that you are not the only one who is interested in this.
    Second, I am not quite sure about the how-to-part, but as I understand it : If you want to have full control, you must tinker with “css”.
    If you do not want to aim that high, or simply (as me !) are too lazy and think it’s too much an effort because what you see on the screen is good enough, you can try different (free) templates (“themes”), toy around with fonts, and use the typography settings. But (like dreaded “word”), what we use here it is not a program for typesetting (“Satzprogramm”), “scribus” maybe or something adobe. It surely is different – and much more pro – when you pay hosting etc.

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    • Thanks for that. I run into spacing problems–oh, maybe once or twice a year. Just often enough to annoy me but not often enough for me to really pursue a solution. I used to work in publishing and didn’t have the luxury of shrugging off a problem like that, but one of the benefits of being retired is that I get to say, “Oh, well, it’s good enough.” I’d love to solve the problem, and might be able to if I’d learn WordPress’s Gutenberg program, but it’s a seriously user-hostile program and I do everything I can to avoid using it. My compromise is to acknowledge the problem but not fix it–which, all told, is a pretty silly way of handling it.

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      • Sorry, I forgot to log in.

        Isn’t the “Gutenberg plug-in” the new editor ?
        Acknowledge the problem one or two times a year, and not fixing it, seems to be the normal, human way of dealing with “things”. The level of suffering is just not right yet.

        Since I read here about the “black cocked hats” of the women’s folk, I wonder whether there is “little red rooster caps” for them men’s folk ?

        The no-corpse-in-cab-policy may possibly date back to the corpse stealing days of 18th/19th centuries – all of a sudden iron grids became all the rage on cemeteries, too !

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        • Yup, Gutenberg’s the new editor. It’s an over-engineered mess.

          The hats? The men wear the same black ones and in the interest of equality, they all look equally silly. Good point about the corpses, though.

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  12. We call these “Blue laws” in the U.S. – old laws that were left on the books that no one’s bothered to remove, but we like to make fun of them. Several states used to have laws about garlic breathe in public places. Like “No riding the bus within five hours of having eaten garlic. (I think that was in Wisconsin.)

    No fake mustaches in an Alabama church that could result in laughter.

    No missiles allowed in Utah bus terminals.

    No bear wrestling in Oklahoma.

    No Sasquatch poaching in my home state of Washington.
    (While we continue to debate the existence of Sasquatch, you can’t poach it to prove your point. LOL :) I must say, I’m rather proud of the fact that we’re willing to protect all animals from poaching even the ones were not sure of existing or not.)

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    • I can see the appeal of protecting nonexistent animals. You can point to the law you passed with pride, knowing it’s never been violated.

      I’m surprised our (I’m still a US citizen) current supreme court hasn’t struck down that law about missiles and bus terminals. Right to keep and bear arms, after all. Not to mention keep and wrestle bears.

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