As to the crime, in the very early Saxon Law, I see an
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.
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