kins and woolpacks than in gentlemen. His lands be _in statutes_:
you merchants were wont to be merchant staplers; but now gentlemen have
gotten up the trade; for there is not one gentleman amongst twenty but
his lands be engaged in twenty statutes staple."

Act i. Sc. 3.

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. Welle