10 - Old Personal Actions

Abstract

This chapter describes the various obligations related to property and law. The modern law of obligations, roughly that concerning contract, tort, and personal chattels, is the result of a continuing interplay between two simple ideas from which the common law started. The complaint of a wrong split into two, the criminal law being the result of the administrative changes needed to enable public authority to take the initiative with wrongdoers, instead of leaving it to their victims to bring them to book. The action of covenant was the oldest one in the king's courts or probably in local courts, and its logic is most easily accessible to the modern mind. In “debt on an obligation,” when the plaintiff had a sealed deed, questions of proof were effectively excluded as they were in covenant. The straightforward use of the simple bond was of course to secure the payment of debts. The borrower of money or the buyer of land or goods would often give a bond for the amount due.