speedy and
efficacious, was rendered more perfect by enactments allowing the thing
taken to be sold. Blackstone notes that the law of distresses in this
respect "has been greatly altered within a few years last past." The
legislature, in fact, converted an ancient right of personal redress
into a powerful remedy for the exclusive benefit of a single class of
creditors, viz. landlords. Now that the relation of landlord and tenant
in England has come to be regarded as purely a matter of contract, the
language of the law-books seems to be singularly inappropriate. The
defaulting tenant is a "wrong-doer," the landlord is the "injured
party,"; any attempt to defeat the landlord's remedy by carrying off
distrainable goods is denounced as "fraudulent and knavish." The
operation of the law has, as we shall point out, been mitigated in some
important respects, but it still remains an almost unique specimen of
one-sided legislation.

At common law distress was said to be incident to _rent service_, and by
particular reservation to rent charges; but by 4 Geo. II. c. 28 it was
extended to _rent seck_, _rents of assize_ and chief rents (see RENT).
It is therefore a general remedy for rent certain in arrear. All
personal chattels are distrainable with the following exceptions:--(1)
things in which there can be no property, as animals _ferae naturae_;
(2) ledgers, daybooks, title-deeds, &c.; (3) things delivered to a
person following a public trade, as a horse sent to be shod, &c.; (4)
things already in the custody of the law; (5) things which cannot be
restored in as good a plight as when distrained, that is, perishable
articles; (6) fixtures; (7) beasts of the plough and instruments of
husbandry while there is other sufficient distress to be found; (8)
instruments of a man's trade or profession in actual use at the time the
distress is made. If not in actual use they are only privileged in case
there is other sufficient distress upon the premises. These exceptions,
it will be seen, imply that the thing distrained is to be held as a
pledge merely--not to be sold. They also imply that in general any
chattels found on the land in question are to be available for the
benefit of the landlord, whether they belong to the tenant or not. This
principle worked with peculiar harshness in the case of lodgers, whose
goods might be seized and sold for the payment of the rent due by their
landlord to his superior landlord. By the Lodgers' Goods Pr