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.