Produced by The Bookworm, Linda Cantoni, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Posner Memorial Collection
(http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/))
[Transcriber's Note: Sir William Blackstone's _Commentaries on the
Laws of England_ was first published in 1765-1769. It contains a number of archaic spellings (including "goaler" for "gaoler" and
"it's" for "its") that have been preserved as they appear in the original. All such spellings have been verified using the Oxford
English Dictionary. Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization, and italicization have also been preserved. Obvious printer errors have been preserved and marked with a [Transcriber's Note]. Long s in the original has been modernized as modern s. The archaic convention of placing quotation marks at the beginning of each line of a quotation has also been modernized to quotation marks only at the beginning and end of the quotation.]
LAWS
OF
ENGLAND.
BOOK THE FIRST.
BY
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, ESQ.
VINERIAN PROFESSOR OF LAW,
AND
SOLICITOR GENERAL TO HER MAJESTY.
OXFORD,
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS.
M. DCC. LXV.
TO
THE QUEEN'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY,
THE FOLLOWING VIEW
OF THE LAWS AND CONSTITUTION
OF ENGLAND,
THE IMPROVEMENT AND PROTECTION OF WHICH
HAVE DISTINGUISHED THE REI…