offence of this species, called Folk-leasing, made a capital
offence, but no very precise definition of the crime, and no trial
at all: see the statute of 3rd Edward I. cap. 34. The law of
libels could not have arrived at a very early period in this
country. It is no wonder that we find no vestige of any
constitution from authority, or of any deductions from legal science
in our old books and records upon that subject. The statute of
scandalum magnatum is the oldest that I know, and this goes but a
little way in this sort of learning. Libelling is not the crime of
an illiterate people. When they were thought no mean clerks who
could read and write, when he who could read and write was
presumptively a person in holy orders, libels could not be general
or dangerous; and scandals merely oral could spread little, and must
perish soon. It is writing, it is printing more emphatically, that
imps calumny with those eagle wings, on which, as the poet says,
"immortal slanders fly." By the press they spread, they last, they
leave the sting in the wound. Printing was not known in England
much earlier than the reign of Henry VII., and in the third year of
that reign the Court of Star Chamber was established. The press and
its enemy are nearly coeval. As no positive law against libels
existed, they fell under the indefinite class of misdemeanours. For
the trial of misdemeanours that court was instituted, their tendency
to produce riots and disorders was a main part of the charge, and
was laid, in order to give the court jurisdiction chiefly against
libels. The offence was new. Learning of their own upon the
subject they had none, and they were obliged to resort to the only
emporium where it was to be had, the Roman Law. After the Star
Chamber was abolished in the 10th of Charles I. its authority indeed
ceased, but its maxims subsisted and survived it. The spirit of the
Star Chamber has transmigrated and lived again, and Westminster Hall