and out the town till he went mad; all which so delighted Earl Warren, that he forthwith gifted the common to the butchers on condition that they provided a mad bull six weeks before Christmas Day, "for the continuance of that sport for ever." It is impossible even to conjecture the origin of other customs. In most manors, when a copy-holder died, his widow had in free-bench (or what the common law calls dower) the whole or part of his lands. There was one restriction: she must remain "sole and chaste." Yet, if she forgot herself, her case was not altogether past praying for in the Manor of Enborne in Berkshire. At the next Customary Court she appeared strangely mounted upon a black ram, her face to the tail, the which grasping in her hand, she recited, sure the merriest, maddest rhyme it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive-- "Here I am Riding upon a black ram"---- Alas, that the rest must be silence! The _Spectator_, greatly daring, gives it in full; but that was as far back as November 1st, 1714. A like custom ruled the Manor of Kilmersdon, in Somerset, where the doggerel, if briefer and blunter, is at least equally gross. And here one must refer to the _jus primæ noctis_, that lewd historic jest which, in England at any rate, was ever a sheer delusion. True that on the marriage of a villein's daughter a fine was paid to the lord, but this was not to spare her blushes, but as compensation to him for the loss of her services--inasmuch as she took the domicile of her husband. Nay, the custom of the manor usually made for morality. There was a fine called child-wit exacted on the birth of an illegitimate child, sometimes from the infant's father, or, again, from the father of its mother. Nay, in one or two places the unlucky lover forfeited all his goods and chattels. On the other hand a curious privilege attached to an oak in Knoll Wood in the Manor of Terley in Staffordshire: "In case oath were made that the bastard was got within the umbrage or reach of its boughs," neither spiritual nor temporal power had ought to say, and the man got off scot free.