Britain pares down silly laws on salmon handling, armour wearing

More than 200 obsolete pieces of legislation, some dating to 1267, are due to be repealed this year

LONDON— It is not a great idea to carry a plank of wood down a busy sidewalk. Nor should you ride a horse while drunk, or handle a salmon under suspicious circumstances. But should such antics be illegal? Still? Thanks to centuries of legislating by Parliament, which bans the wearing of suits of armour in its chambers, Britain has accumulated many laws that nowadays seem irrelevant, and often absurd.

So voluminous and eccentric is Britain’s collective body of 44,000 pieces of primary legislation that it has a small team of officials whose sole task is to prune it.

Their work is not just a constitutional curiosity, but a bulwark against hundreds of years of law-making running out of control.

Over the centuries, rules have piled up to penalize those who fire a cannon within 300 yards of a dwelling and those who beat a carpet in the street — unless the item can be classified as a doormat and it is beaten before 8 a.m.

“To have a legal situation where there is so much information that you cannot sit down and comprehend it, does seem to me a serious problem,” said Andrew Lewis, professor emeritus of comparative legal history at University College London. “I think it matters dreadfully that no one can get a handle on the whole of it.”

Yet, as Lewis also noted, many old laws have survived because crime and bad behaviour have, too.

“One reason is that human nature doesn’t change much,” Lewis said, “though of course the institutions which we develop to protect, organize, and govern ourselves do change, and then it becomes necessary to adjust the existing law to practice.”

Sifting out the obsolete legislation is the work of two lawyers and a researcher at Britain’s Law Commission, which is responsible for reviewing laws and recommending changes.

Thanks to them, more than 200 measures are scheduled to be repealed next year, including some — but not all — of a law dating to 1267.

Among those set to go are many church laws (including one from a 1536 act authorizing the extension of a London graveyard), and a variety of acts related to British colonial rule in India. These include the India Steam Ship Company Act of 1838, which has been in force for 177 years, although there is no evidence that the shipping firm established through the act ever started work.

So extensive is the statute book that the Law Commission has published a guide debunking some more far-fetched urban myths about it.

The commission has found no evidence, for example, of any law stating that in the city of Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless in public except while working as a clerk in a tropical fish store. Nor is it true that a man may urinate in public, providing he does so against the rear-passenger-side wheel of his vehicle, with his right hand placed upon it.

Some of the actual laws, however antiquated they may seem, have proved surprisingly durable.

Though some elements of the 1267 Statute of Marlborough are set to be repealed next year, others, including one relating to the seizure of goods to satisfy debts, will remain. This piece of legislation predates the incorporation into law of Magna Carta (which was signed in 1215 but which was not enrolled on the statute book until 1297).

Another medieval act, Quia Emptores, which was passed in 1290, also established important principles for English property law.

Before any repeal is proposed to Parliament, the law is thoroughly researched and discussed, said Elaine Lorimer, chief executive of the Law Commission.

“Just the age of the legislation isn’t a determining factor,” she said. “The research has got to be done to make sure that actually this is no longer required.”