And in the very first speech of the first scene of the same play, the husband of this virtuous and careful dame says of the same "Gerardine," (who, as he is poor and a gentleman, it need hardly be said, is about the only honest man in the piece,)—"His lands be in statutes." And that poor debauchee, Robert Greene, who knew no more of law than he might have derived from such limited, though authentic information as to its powers over gentlemen who made debts without the intention of paying them, as he may have received at frequent unsolicited interviews with a sergeant or a bum-bailiff, has this passage in his "Quip for an Upstart Courtier," 1592:—
"The mercer he followeth the young upstart gentleman that hath no government of himself and feedeth his humour to go brave; he shall not want silks, sattins, velvets to pranke abroad in his pompe; but with this proviso, that he must bind over his land in a statute merchant or staple; and so at last forfeit all unto the merciless mercer, and leave himself never a foot of land in England."
Very profound legal studies, therefore, cannot be predicated of Shakespeare on the ground of the knowledge which he has shown of this peculiar kind of statute.
It is not surprising that both our legal Shakespearean commentators cite the following passage from "As You Like It" in support of their theory; for in it the word "extent" is used in a sense so purely technical, that not one in a thousand of Shakespeare's lay readers now-a-days would understand it without a note:—
Duke F. Well, push him out of doors, And let my officers of such a nature Make an extent upon his house and lands." Act iii. Sc. 1.
"Extent," as Mr. Rushton remarks, is directed to the sheriff to seize and value lands and goods to the utmost extent; "an extendi facias" as Lord Campbell authoritatively says, "applying to the house and lands as a fieri facias would apply to goods and chattels, or a capias ad satisfaciendum to the person." But that John Fletcher knew, as well as my Lord Chief Justice, or Mr. Barrister Rushton, or even, perhaps, William Shakespeare, all the woes that followed an extent, the elder Mr. Weller at least would not have doubted, had he in the course of his literary leisure fallen upon the following passage in "Wit Without Money" (1630):—
"Val Mark me, widows
Are long extents in law upon men's livings,
Upon their bodies' winding-sheets; they that enjoy 'em
Lie but with dead men's monuments, and beget
Only their own ill epitaphs."
Act ii. Sc. 2.
George Wilkins, too, the obscure author of "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," uses the term with as full an understanding, though not with so feeling an expression or so scandalous an illustration of it, in the following passage from the fifth act of that play, which was produced about 1605 or 1606:—
"They are usurers; they come yawning for money; and the sheriff with them is come to serve an extent upon your land, and then seize your body by force of execution."
Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances of it, is "taken with the manner." This has nothing to do with good manners or ill manners; but, in the words of the old law-book before cited,—