The tail end of the year in the legal profession is about completing what is possible and preparing everything that is not for a New Year focused on progressing cases and moving legal processes forward.
Whilst the progress on conveyancing and probate can be disrupted over the festive season due to bank holidays and somewhat staggered returns, a good firm of solicitors will do what they can and keep all parties informed of the progress leading up to January.
On the other hand, the law often comes up during Christmas in rather more unusual circumstances, typically involving bits of trivia found in Christmas presents and quizzes.
These are often all in the spirit of good fun and are prone to cause more than a few arguments. The only problem is that quite a few of these myths are simply untrue, or at least untrue today.
Here are the most notable examples.
Putting A Stamp On Upside Down Will Not Get You Executed
One of the most lurid myths when it comes to English law is that you can be sent to the gallows for affixing a stamp to an envelope upside down, as this was defacing the image of the monarch and therefore an act of treason.
The first and easiest step to debunking this is that treason has not carried the death penalty since Section 36 the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 came into law, which abolished the death penalty for the last two civilian crimes which technically carried it.
This was “piracy with violence” as defined by the Piracy Act 1837 and high treason, which is somewhat nebulously defined but it usually involves acts of disloyalty to the Crown intended to cause significant harm, including plotting the murder or deposing of the Monarch.
That aside, whilst the use of high treason as a legal accusation has caused no end of controversy, including the last man to ever be executed for it, it typically required a significantly stronger illegal act and intention to betray the country than sticking a stamp upside down.
The most recent person to be arrested under the Treason Act 1842, Jaswant Chial, went to the grounds of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow and made threats against the Queen. Even then, he was only convicted of a “high misdemeanour” and received nine years’ imprisonment.
You Do Not Need To Show Up For Longbow Practice
A common claim, one rather famously invoked in 2010 in a Devonshire village, is that all able-bodied English men under the age of 60 needed to own a longbow, arrows, target butts and practice archery.
Whilst there were various archery laws dating as far back as the 13th century, the one most commonly cited here was the Unlawful Games Act 1541, which also banned all games on Christmas Day except for archery, with fines for noncompliance.
This law was in place for centuries albeit almost never enforced, but the Reverend who claimed it was still in force was in fact wrong to make that assertion. The parts of the Unlawful Games Act relating to archery were repealed in 1845, most of the rest by 1948 and the entire Act by 1960.
Whilst it is delightfully quaint to claim that England was a hidden nation of archers, it simply has not been the case for nearly two centuries.
