Airing Your Dirty Laundry In Public and Other Crazy Laws

by Hermione Avila - Paralegal

16 July 2012, filed under Legal Advice

You may have heard that it is ok to shoot a Welshman in Chester with a bow and arrow on a Sunday within the city walls. You may have also heard the law that all cabbies must carry a bale of hay in the boot. These laws are in fact non-existent nowadays! A cabby used to be a horse drawn carriage and therefore you can perhaps see the sense in a law like that being in existence. However the truth is that the laws back then made it illegal to feed the horses on anything except oats from a nosebag or for the cabby to hand feed the horse oats and hay. Some of the old laws are still around today. Here are our top 3:

3 Armour must not be worn in parliament.

The Statute Forbidding Bearing of Armour was passed in 1313. However, the original statute was not written in modern English at the time, having been passed during the reign of Edward I but the basic premise of the statute is that “the king forbids the coming armed to Parliament”. This law is still in effect today although the likelihood of any MPs arriving at Parliament in chainmail is rather slim!

2 A beached whale is the property of the king/queen.

The Prerogativa Regis of 1322 states that a whale caught or washed up on the shores of the British Isles should belong to the king or queen reigning at the time. Whist this law has not been repealed, in reality should a whale be washed up then the Natural History Museum would be assigned to deal with it.

1 It is illegal to air laundry in the street

Not only is it illegal to air your laundry in the street but it also illegal to beat any rug unless it is a doormat but even then it must be done before 8am. There are many laws that restrict our public behaviour and include singing rude songs, shouting profanities in the street and even flying a kite!

None of the above is very helpful legal advice, granted, but it is rather funny! If you are looking for (proper) legal advice then why not check out that section of our site?