IN ENGLAND.
In England as early as the reign of Alfred, penal laws were enacted against usury.-' By those laws it was enacted that the chattels of usurers should be forfeited to the king, their lands escheat to the lords of the fee, and they should not be buried in the sanctuary.^ A century and a half later, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the severity of the law of Alfred was improved upon, and the statute then di- rected that the usurer should forfeit all his substance, should be outlawed, and his heir disinherited.^ Wil- liam the Conqueror afterwards added other punish- ments, such as whipping, exposure on the pillory, and perpetual banishment. But these statutes were much modified in subsequent reigns, and in the time of Henry the Second (12th century), according to Glan- ville,* the usurer was not liable to be convicted during his lifetime, and only forfeited his goods and chattels after death ; and that even after he had been convicted of usury he was permitted to expiate his crime by penitence, and so discharge himself from '2 Roll Abr., SOO. 'Slnstlbl. '2 EoU. Abr., 800. Et Grot. " Glanv., lib. 7, o. 16. 3 (33)
those forfeitures to which his goods and chattels were otherwise liable at his death.^ In the twentieth year of the reign of Henry III., A. D. 1235, was passed the Statute of Merton,^ the first statute in which the word usury occurs. It was then enacted, that " from thenceforth usury should not run against any being within age, from the time of the death of his ancestor (whose heir he was)
unto his lawful age." The real object of this statute seems to have given rise to much difference of opinion among the schoolmen, and Sir Edward Coke, in speaking of it, said it was very diversely expounded by