It was indeed the effect of the irregular government during those ages, that a statute which had been enacted some years, instead of acquiring, was imagined to lose, force by time, and needed to be often renewed by recent statutes of the same sense and tenor.

Hence likewise that general clause, so frequent in old acts of parliament, that the statutes, enacted by the king's progenitors, should be observed;[**] a precaution which, if we do not consider the circumstances of the times, might appear absurd and ridiculous.

The frequent confirmations in general terms of the privileges of the church proceeded from the same cause.
It is a clause in one of Edward's statutes, "that no man, of what estate or condition soever, shall be put out of land or tenement, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disherited, nor put to death, without being brought in answer by due process of the law."[***] This privilege was sufficiently secured by a clause of the Great Charter, which had received a general confirmation in the first chapter of the same statute.

Why then is the clause so anxiously, and, as we may think, so superfluously repeated?
Plainly, because there had been some late infringements of it, which gave umbrage to the commons.[****] * 4 Edward III.cap.

14.
** 36 Edward III.cap.1.37 Edward III.cap.1, etc.
*** 28 Edward III.cap.