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the money was deemed still to belong to the creditor, as if the identical coins were merely in the debtor's custody. The creditor sued to recover money, for centuries after the Norman Conquest, in exactly the same form which he would have used to demand possession of land; the action of debt closely resembled the "real actions," and, like them, might be finally determined by a judicial combat; and down to Blackstone's time the creditor was said to have a property in the debt--property which the debtor had "granted" him. Giving credit, in this way of thinking, is not reliance on the right to call hereafter for an act, the payment of so much current money or its equivalent, to be performed by the debtor, but merely suspension of the immediate right to possess one's own particular money, as the owner of a house let for a term suspends his right to occupy it. This was no road to the modern doctrine of contract, and the passage had to be made another way. Action for debt. In fact the old action of debt covered part of the ground of contract only by accident. It was really an action to recover any property that was not land; for the remedy of a dispossessed owner of chattels, afterwards known as detinue, was only a slightly varying form of it. If the property claimed was a certain sum of money, it might be due because the defendant had received money on loan, or because he had received goods of which the agreed price remained unpaid; or, in later times at any rate, because he had become liable in some way by judgment, statute or other authority of law, to pay a fine or fixed penalty to the plaintiff. Here the person recovering might be as considerable as the lord of a manor, or as mean as a "common informer"; the principle was the same. In every case outside this last class, that is to say, whenever there was a debt in the popular sense of the word, it had to be shown that the defendant had actually received the money or goods; this value received came to be called _quid pro quo_--a term unknown, to all appearance, out of England. Nevertheless the foundation of the plaintiff's right was not bargain or promise, but the unjust detention by the defendant of the plaintiff's money or goods. Modes of proof. We are not concerned here to trace the change from the ancient method of proof--oath backed by "good suit," _i.e._ the oaths of an adequate number of friends and neighbours--through the earlier form of jury tri
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