'DRIVERS WHO RESPOND WITH DEMANDS BASED ON MEDIEVAL CUSTOMS WILL NOT EVADE PROSECUTION'

Could the Middle Ages get you out of a speeding fine?

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Throw your mind back to peak Covid - if you can bear to - and you may recall that there was a funny trend for people trying to get around modern laws by appealing to medieval customs.

This usually meant bold proprieters opening barber shops or pubs or whatever in defiance of lockdown laws, and posting a half-cocked sign in the window claiming that under Magna Carta blah blah freeman of the shire and so forth, screw you pigs, I do what please.

I remember writing about this phenomenon at the time, and feeling a curious combination of emotions. On the one hand, citing Magna Carta to get around Covid regulations was, as the physicists say, not even wrong.

Yet at the same time I felt a pang of sympathy.

I’ve been revisiting those feelings today, after reading about this dude, who tried to get out of a speeding fine by conducting his own super-hokey quasi-legal defence and ended up in worse bother than when he started.

Whether or not he really used medieval law… that’s a VERY ‘Last Duel’ grade haircut

Our hero is a 28-year old called George Thomas. That’s him, up there, wearing the mullet. George was doing 58mph in a 50mph zone. He got busted. He could have paid a small fine. Instead…