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[Article] 'Ordeal of water' law to be thrown out

  • 10-01-2007 11:54am
    #1
    Victor
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 78,521 ✭✭✭✭


    More information http://www.attorneygeneral.ie/slru/pre_ind_project.html

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6246779.stm

    http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/topstories/9656266?view=Eircomnet
    'Ordeal of water' law to be thrown out
    From:ireland.com
    Wednesday, 10th January, 2007

    Suspected murderers and thieves will no longer face the risk of being thrown into water with a millstone around their necks once the repeal of 800 years of legislation takes place.

    Offering a "zero-tolerance" approach, the Assise of Clarendon allowed the community to subject suspected thieves and killers to the "ordeal of water" - if they sank, they were deemed guilty.

    Though residents living in and around Bellewstown Castle, Co Meath might not have known it, they have been living in a tax haven for hundreds of years - equal to those found anywhere abroad.

    Following "depredations by the O'Connor clan", Bellewstown natives were given the right to repel by force any tax collectors who tried to gather taxes after they were "exempted and discharged from payment of any subsidy or tax".

    Other laws to be repealed include an Act of 1310 which provided that only Englishmen and women were entitled "to be received into religious orders", and one from 1360 forbidding anyone from sending their child to be nursed by an Irishwoman.

    A law from 1410 that gave defendants three weeks to travel for a court appearance will disappear into the history books, as will one from 1326 preventing shopkeepers from cutting the price of wool.

    French citizens living in Ireland will, no doubt, be relieved that an 11th-century statute providing for "Frenchmen to pay 'scot and lot' ", which was a discriminatory tax, will also be no more.

    Some of the laws are so old that no one is sure when they were passed, particularly as one goes back to the distant days of William The Conqueror.

    An Act passed some time between 1070 and 1087 declared that he should "be revered throughout the whole realm" and that "peace and security" should be "preserved between English and Norman".


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