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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is professor of history at the University of Reading and author of ‘Rival Queens’
Anyone passing under the Millennium Bridge, between the Tate and St Paul’s, this week would have had a surprise — a large bale of straw hanging down into the Thames. As instructed by an ancient bylaw from the Port of London, workers have to dangle straw over the river during the day and a white light at night, in order to alert ships that the headroom of the bridge would be reduced.
But surely, one might say, a traffic cone on a rope would be a better and more contemporary indication? Apparently not. As the City Bridge Foundation, the charity which looks after five of London’s major bridges, explained, the law means straw. And so we saw modern construction workers lowering a bale, just as their predecessors of old might once have done. Crossings over the Thames date back to Roman times, though happily the custom of displaying the heads of traitors on London Bridge ended in the seventeenth century.
The UK has many laws which can be flouted, or are generally ignored as no longer pertinent, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still in force. Our legal framework has been bolted together over centuries, and not always in the most efficient way. If a piece of law is so obviously irrelevant, why take it off the books?
Rishi Sunak and the front bench might occasionally like to wear suits of armour to Prime Minister’s Question Time, but a 1313 statute, introduced by King Edward II, forbids anyone to wear armour in parliament. Edward II, unpopular due to his fondness for courtier Piers Gaveston, had seen nobles try to intimidate him by turning up fully armed. His attempt to outlaw them from clanking into his presence didn’t work, though — the statute was the fifth time he had tried to ban armour at parliament, and even so it was flouted repeatedly.
Acts that were outlawed by the Victorians include putting a pigsty outside your house and shaking a rug in the street in the early morning, as well as using a dog cart, or being drunk in charge of a cow. More recently, since 1986 it has been illegal to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances . . . whatever that might mean.
Sadly, London cabbies do not have to carry a bale of straw to feed their horse, an oft-cited law that was in fact repealed in the 1970s. And if you are Welsh, you can safely stay within the boundaries of the city of Chester without being attacked by a longbow. Nor, thank goodness, is it illegal for women to eat chocolate while travelling by bus (an apocryphal law which never seems to have existed).
Unique laws are often brought in during wartime. In the first world war, whistling for a cab was forbidden, as was using invisible ink to write letters overseas and feeding horses bread. The “no treating” order of 1915 forbade anyone from buying a drink for another in a pub, after an anti-alcohol campaign spearheaded by David Lloyd George. Customers were allowed to buy a friend a drink if it was accompanied by a meal, which triggered discussion on what constituted a “meal” — did a biscuit count? A sandwich?
In the second world war, the medium Helen Duncan claimed that HMS Barham had been sunk. The sinking was supposed to be a secret. She was later prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, much to the frustration of Winston Churchill, who complained about that act and its “obsolete tomfoolery” being “used in a modern Court of Justice”. The Witchcraft Act was replaced after the war with the Fraudulent Mediums Act — which itself was later repealed in 2008 by consumer protection laws, preventing unfair sales practices.
Often, these laws simply remain until someone realises they shouldn’t be there. But let’s hope the straw dangling nostalgically from the bridge stays on the books.
