time than the person shall inhabit thereon. He is in no case removable from his own property: but he shall not by any trifling or fraudulent purchase of his own acquire a permanent and lasting settlement. ALL not so settled persons be removed to their own may parishes on complaint of the overseers by two justices of the peace, if they shall adjudge them likely to become chargeable to the parish into which they have intruded: unless they are in a way of getting a legal settlement, as by having hired a house of 10l. per annum, or living in an annual service; for [ 365 ] then they are not removable. And in all other cases, if the parish to which they belong will grant them a certificate acknowledging them to be their parishioners, they cannot be removed merely because likely to become chargeable, but only when they become actually chargeable. But such certificated person can gain no settlement by any of the means above mentioned, unless by renting a tenement of 10l. per annum, or by serving an annual office in the parish, being legally placed therein: neither can an apprentice or servant to such certificated person gain a settlement by such their service . (27) d Stat. 9 Geo. I. c.7. f Stat. 8 & 9 W. III. c. 30. (27) A certificate has been defined to be "a most solemn acknowledgment by the parish which gives it, that the parties, who are the subject of it, are their legally settled inhabitants." The effect of it is to make those who reside under it irremoveable, until actually chargeable, and also incapable of conferring a settlement in the certificated parish, or acquiring one except by renting a tenement of 10l. a year, or executing an annual office therein. It took its rise and was several times modified by statutes passed at a time when a man was removeable, if only likely to be chargeable to the parish in which he was resident; but when the 35 G.3. c.101. took away from magistrates the power of removing any one till he was actually chargeable, the great necessity for certificates died away, and the practice of granting them has become less and less frequent. This provision of the legislature however was necessarily accompanied with some others, without which it would have worked great injustice; in the first place, the settlement by mere residence with express notice was absolutely taken away; for as the object of that notice was to warn the parish officers and enable them to remove in time where there was a likelihood of chargeability, and the power to remove under such circumstances was now taken THESE are the general heads of the laws relating to the poor, which, by the resolutions of the courts of justice thereon within a century past, are branched into a great variety. And yet, notwithstanding the pains that have been taken about them, they still remain very imperfect, and inadequate to the purposes they are designed for: a fate that has generally attended most of our statute laws, where they have not the foundation of the common law to build on. When the shires, the hundreds, and the tithings, were kept in the same admirable order in which they were disposed by the great Alfred, there were no persons idle, consequently none but the impotent that needed relief: and the statute of 43 Eliz. seems entirely founded on the same principle. But when this excellent scheme was neglected and departed from, we cannot but observe with concern what miserable shifts and lame expedients have from time to time been adopted, in order to patch up the flaws occasioned by this neglect. There is not a more necessary or more certain maxim in the frame and constitution of society, than that every individual must con away, the notice was become useless to them, and therefore was not allowed to be operative for the individual. 2d. Unmarried women with child, and persons convicted of felony, or under the vagrant laws, were declared to be as such actually chargeable. As the child would be settled where born, it was necessary to give a power to remove the mother before the birth, who might else have been purposely kept from becoming actually chargeable in the parish in order to settle the child there. The same statute contained a humane provision to prevent removals of paupers being made at improper times, which was often done in order to free the parish from the maintenance to which it was liable, till the execution of the order. It therefore empowers the magistrates who make the order (and by the 49 G.3. c.124. the same power is given to any other { two magistrates) to suspend the execution of it so long as by reason of sickness or any infirmity the pauper is unable or unfit to travel; when the order is so suspended with respect to the pauper himself, its execution is also by the 49 G.3. c.124. to be postponed as to every other person , named in it, and actually of the household or family when the order was made. During such suspension the pauper can gain no settlement by any act of his own in the parish in which he remains, and he remains there at f the costs of the parish to which he belongs. And with respect to the children of unmarried women, who shall be born while their mothers are residing in a parish under a suspended order, the statute declares their settlement to be in the parishes of their mothers, and not in the places of their births. 3 tribute his share in order to the well-being of the community : and surely they must be very deficient in sound policy, who suffer one half of a parish to continue idle, dissolute, and unemployed; and at length are amazed to find, that the industry of the other half is not able to maintain the whole. (28) (28) Perhaps the censure in the text upon the poor laws is too severe and indiscriminate, as the statement of the police of the country in the time of Alfred is undoubtedly too highly coloured. Public opinion, which of late years set strongly against the whole system, has more recently suffered a considerable change; and many of its ablest opponents seem disposed to think that something in the nature of our poor laws is at least a necessary evil, while others are willing to concede that well administered and slightly modified they may be made a substantial benefit. I forbear to enter on so difficult and important a subject in a note, as the policy of a poor law system; but it is undoubtedly to be regretted that the system of settlement in England is more encumbered with subtle distinctions and conflicting decisions than any other head in the law. The best accounts of them may be found in Mr. Nolan's Treatise on the Poor Laws, and Burn's Justice, title Poor. CHAPTER THE TENTH. OF THE PEOPLE, WHETHER ALIENS, HAVING, in the eight preceding chapters, treated of persons as they stand in the public relations of magistrates, I now proceed to consider such persons as fall under the denomination of the people. And herein all the inferior and subordinate magistrates, treated of in the last chapter, are included. THE first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England; that is, within the ligeance, or, as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king: and aliens, such as are born out of it. Allegiance is the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject. The thing itself, or substantial part of it, is founded in reason and the nature of government; the name and the form are derived to us from our Gothic ancestors. Under the feodal system, every owner of lands held them in subjection to some superior or lord, from whom or whose ancestors the tenant or vasal had received them; and there was a mutual trust or confidence subsisting between the lord and vasal, that the lord should protect the vasal in the enjoyment of the territory he had granted him, and, on the other hand, that the vasal should be faithful to the lord, and defend him against all his enemies. This obligation on the part of the vasal was called his fidelitas or fealty; and an oath of fealty was required, by the feodal law, to be taken by all tenants to their landlord, which is couched in almost the same terms as our antient oath of allegiance a; except that in the usual oath of fealty there was frequently a saving or exception of the faith due to a superior lord by name, under whom the landlord himself was perhaps only a tenant or vasal. But when the acknowledgment was made to the absolute superior himself, who was vasal to no man, it was no longer called the oath of fealty, but the oath of allegiance; and therein the tenant swore to bear faith to his sovereign lord, in opposition to all men, without any saving or exception; "contra omnes "homines fidelitatem fecit." Land held by this exalted. species of fealty was called feudum ligium, a liege fee; the vasals homines ligii, or liege men; and the sovereign their dominus ligius, or liege lord. And when sovereign princes did homage to each other for lands held under their respective sovereignties, a distinction was always made between simple homage, which was only an acknowledgment of tenure ©; and liege homage, which included the fealty before mentioned, and the services consequent upon it. Thus when our Edward III., in 1329, did homage to Philip VI. of France, for his ducal dominions on that continent, it was warmly disputed of what species the homage was to be, whether liege or simple homage. But with us in England, it becoming a settled principle of tenure, that all lands in the kingdom are holden of the king as their sovereign and lord paramount, no oath but that of fealty could ever be taken to inferior lords, and the oath of allegiance was necessarily confined to the person of the king alone. By an easy analogy the term of allegiance was soon brought to signify all other engagements which are due from subjects to their prince, as well as those duties which were simply and merely territorial. And the oath of [ 368 ] allegiance, as administered for upwards of six hundred years, contained a promise" to be true and faithful to the king and "his heirs, and truth and faith to bear of life and limb and "terrene honour, and not to know or hear of any ill or damage intended him, without defending him therefrom." Upon which sir Matthew Hale' makes this remark; that it was short and plain, not entangled with long or intricate |