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An instant afterward he had closed the door behind us, and we had become felons in the eyes of the law.
From the Conquest or even earlier they had, besides various lesser rights - (1) exemption from tax and tallage; (2) soc and sac, or full cognizance of all criminal and civil cases within their liberties; (3) tol and team, or the right of receiving toll and the right of compelling the person in whose hands stolen property was found to name the person from whom he received it; (4) blodwit and fledwit, or the right to punish shedders of blood and those who were seized in an attempt to escape from justice; (5) pillory and tumbrel; (6) infangentheof and r L outfangentheof, or power to imprison and execute felons; (7) mundbryce (the breaking into or violation of a man's mund or property in order to erect banks or dikes as a defence against the sea); (8) waives and strays, or the right to appropriate lost property or cattle not claimed within a year and a day; (9) the right to seize all flotsam, jetsam, or ligan, or, in other words, whatever of value was cast ashore by the sea; (10) the privilege of being a gild with power to impose taxes for the common weal; and (11) the right of assembling in portmote or parliament at Shepway or Shepway Cross, a few miles west of Hythe (but afterwards at Dover), the parliament being empowered to make by-laws for the Cinque Ports, to regulate the Yarmouth fishery, to hear appeals from the local courts, and to give decision in all cases of treason, sedition, illegal coining or concealment of treasure trove.
The citizens of London having suffered from the depredations of thieves and felons who escaped into Southwark, petitioned parliament for protection.
All male citizens over twenty-one years of age and resident in the state for one year and in the county or election precinct for six months immediately preceding election (except paupers, idiots, lunatics, felons, United States soldiers, marines and seamen, and persons who have taken part, either as principal or second, in fighting a duel or in sending a challenge) have the right of suffrage.
In the state reformatory at Elmira (which, like that at Napanoch, is for men between sixteen and thirty years of age who have been convicted of a state prison offence for the first time only), the plan of committing adult felons on an indeterminate sentence to be determined by their behaviour was first tested in America in 1877, and it has proved so satisfactory that it has been in part adopted for the state prisons.