What other myths are there along the same lines as it is lawful for a pregnant woman to pee into a policeman’s helmet?

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Alturnix@reddit

There's the one that has several variations that I've heard of that essentially boil down to it being legal to shoot a Welshman from or within the Walls of Chester after midnight.

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SignificantAd3761@reddit

Likewise the battlements of Shrewsbury Castle

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TheseThoseThine@reddit

Carlisle and Scots too. Specifically that it was legal to shoot a Scotsman within the city walls after dark with a crossbow.

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YchYFi@reddit

Laws against murdering people superseded that.

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decisiontoohard@reddit

Genuinely helpful for me to understand the order of operations here, I had assumed murder was already unlawful with these exceptions and the exceptions expired, but reality is simpler than cogitation

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Particular-Swim-9293@reddit

That you can demand fresh baker's yeast from any baker for free. You used to be able to but not any more.

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Wee_Potatoes@reddit

That you can quote the Magna Carta and somehow have magical rights to do wherever mad shit you want to do because it supercedes any other law.

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The on that makes me laugh the most about this is that all the fuckwits you see trying to claim this shit call it the magna carta whereas if they had actually done any kind of study on it they would know that the "the" is is not used when referring to magna carta as it is a proper noun!

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OrangeBeast01@reddit

That you can pay for things with stamps.

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Toc13s@reddit

Technically, it is legal tender & could be accepted - but it doesn't have to be

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RealLongwayround@reddit

There is not one reliable source that I can find to support this position.

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Toc13s@reddit

Have a check in the back of magazines from the 70s & 80s.

Full of adverts for products, requesting payment in stamps. It was a safe way of sending money at the time

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InternationalRide5@reddit

More that a lot of people didn't have bank accounts.

You could buy a postal order from the Post Office, but that had a fee attached, so for small things like catalogues and leaflets etc stamps were a reasonable alternative.

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RealLongwayround@reddit

That however has nothing to do with legal tender. If I request payment in cans of dog food, then that does not lend support to the idea that cans of dog food must be accepted as a means of fully paying off a debt where no contract specifying another form of payment exists.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/what-is-legal-tender

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OrangeBeast01@reddit

It isn't legal tender.

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alex21dragons@reddit

The Coinage Act 1971 requires that payment of debts be accepted in certain maximum amounts of coins but that's the only current legislation on what people have to accept as payment. Stamps are as valid a way of paying as offering to swap your lawn mower for someone else's strimmer.

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Panceltic@reddit

It really isn’t.

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Personal-Listen-4941@reddit

Technically that’s true. You can use whatever goods/services you want as a payment. That’s the basis of the barter system. However there is no law that says you have to accept payment in stamps.

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ambigulous_rainbow@reddit

Another pissing one, that it's legal to pee in public as long as it's on the rear offside wheel of your car. Some say there's a caveat that it's legal as long as your right hand is touching the car. Both are myths. They won't let us piss anywhere, man 😭

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dave8271@reddit

It's not specifically illegal to urinate in public, in any case. Rather the laws you'd fall foul of would be around indecent exposure, outraging public decency and the like.

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decisiontoohard@reddit

So it may be legal to piss yourself if you stay clothed the whole time?

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artfulmonica@reddit

That its legal to shoot a Scottish person with a bow and arrow from York city walls. I mean I believe the law still exists but you won't det away with it.

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Jazzlike-Basil1355@reddit (OP)

But they are too far away, even in the borders

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VerbingNoun413@reddit

Madlib time because there are numerous variants of this one!

Name: A European nationality besides English, an English city, a weapon, a piece of medieval architecture.

!It is legal to kill a [nationality]man in [city] as long as you use a [weapon] and are in/on [architecture].!<

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thedrunkdingo@reddit

Wait, that’s a myth?! I was kinda looking forward to doing that someday

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kalendral_42@reddit

I remember one about it being illegal to eat peanuts in a church on a Tuesday (every other day it was apparently fine)

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kalendral_42@reddit

That Penguins fall over backwards if a plane flies over them

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kalendral_42@reddit

That if you have the key to London City you’re allowed to drive sheep across London Bridge - you’re not

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MINKIN2@reddit

You can cut a branch off from a Ewe tree on Sundays for a Bow (bow and arrows). It comes from medieval times and is why you can still see Ewe trees in church grounds today.

Taxi cabs need to be able to fit a bales of hay in their boot/trunk. This was from the old horse and cart Hackney Carriage days, but the "hay bale" stayed around for longer than the horse and cart as the dimensions fitted luggage sizes rather well.

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Old_Introduction_395@reddit

Please don't cut up female sheep.

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meatflaps-69@reddit

yew

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jibbit@reddit

it is illegal to be carrying a salmon on a tuesday

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Jazzlike-Basil1355@reddit (OP)

There is still an offence of handling salmon in suspicious circumstances

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I_ALWAYS_UPVOTE_CATS@reddit

That's a decent example for this thread, since most people I think imagine someone wearing a balaclava sneaking around at night with a salmon. But what the law actually refers to is the salmon being suspicious, not the person doing the carrying. The idea is to prevent illegal fishing, so if you know of a nearby river that has signs saying 'protected species, no fishing', and then someone in the pub offers you a salmon saying 'yeah yeah it's fine my mate's brother knows the gamekeeper and gets these for cheap', you have reason to suspect that the salmon was fished illegally. Therefore, you would be committing an offence by handling said salmon, similar to handling stolen goods.

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NeedleworkerBig3980@reddit

We have a family joke that this law exists due to my Grandfather. He once successfully smuggling a whole frozen salmon back from Ireland down his trouser leg.

He used his walking stick and no one questioned his stiff limp.

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SpaceTall2312@reddit

Apparently it is still the law that every young man should practice the longbow at least once a week under the tutelage of the local clergy. I can't find out if that's actually true though!

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SignificantAd3761@reddit

In the UK it was law to put l that you had to practice archery weekly, and I don't think it has been repealed. I think we're all also meant to have grain / hay for horses on the back of our carriages

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SpaceTall2312@reddit

I think it's a law worth bringing back! Sunday afternoon archery sounds OK to me!

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imtheorangeycenter@reddit

That's why there's no mid-afternoon football on TV.

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Toc13s@reddit

That was for hackney carriages ( now, taxis) but is no longer a requirement

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SnooEpiphanies8006@reddit

Came to say this

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MINKIN2@reddit

Kinda... Taxis (especially the hackney licence) do still need to be able to hold luggage of a certain capacity, And well in to the 70s the Hay bale was used as a metric, if not physically, for a car to be eligible for a taxi licence.

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Sleightholme2@reddit

It isn't, the requirement to carry out archery practice was repealed by the Betting and Gaming Act 1960. The Unlawful Games Act 1541 required every Englishman between the ages of 17 and 60 (with various exemptions) to keep a longbow and regularly practise archery. So it was around for over 400 years.

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lostlookingforamap@reddit

It has to be on a Sunday too

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alphahydra@reddit

That adding "I do not own the rights to this song. No copyright infringement intended" to a YouTube video or whatever somehow protects you against copyright claims.

That sticking a printed copy of your own novel manuscript/screenplay/invention idea in an envelope and mailing it to yourself is a reliable way of proving/protecting authorship.

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neilm1000@reddit

That sticking a printed copy of your own novel manuscript/screenplay/invention idea in an envelope and mailing it to yourself is a reliable way of proving/protecting authorship.

Surely no one has ever actually done this?!

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tunaman808@reddit

Surely no one has ever actually done this?!

It's called "Poor Man's Copyright". It was a "thing" (that is, an idea) at least as far back as when I was in high school in the 80s. I actually had some friends who were considering mailing themselves cassettes of their band.

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JakeRiddoch@reddit

Can confirm, I recall hearing about it in the 80s. We just believed it (I was a kid at the time, so that's my excuse), although with a more experienced head, it does seem to be a rather odd mechanism with many flaws.

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alphahydra@reddit

I don't know how widespread the actual practice is, but I've seen and heard it recommended online a lot over the years, so there's definitely a reasonably widespread, parroted belief in its effectiveness.

For those who haven't heard it, the idea is the dated postmark on the sealed letter supposedly proves you had the idea before that date, so if someone later copies you, you can have a lawyer unseal the envelope and confirm the contents confirm you had the idea first.

It doesn't hold up, because it would be trivial for a dishonest person to just post themselves a bunch of unsealed envelopes, get them postmarked and then years later stick the sheet music for a just-released hit song (or whatever) inside to "prove" they wrote it first.

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bluejackmovedagain@reddit

It's still incorrect, but the version of this advice I heard includes putting the stamp and address on the wrong side of the envelope because it would be hard for someone to line everything up properly if they opened and then resealed it.

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nikadi@reddit

I know a few musicians who have and claim that it covers them because it's dated by the post office 🤦‍♀️

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neilm1000@reddit

I've heard of this but I honestly didn't think people did it because its...well, nonsense.

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alphahydra@reddit

I bet more people have done this than piss in a policeman's helmet, put it that way 😂

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Icy_Attention3413@reddit

They have to hang a bale of straw under some of the bridges’ arches in London at very high water. Or something.

In my town, the Lord Mayor has to ride naked “excepting a modeste cover of linen to preserve his dignity” on an ox on St Swithin’s Day and must dispense favours of 1d to unmarried women.

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Jazzlike-Basil1355@reddit (OP)

Nice one

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queergoblin95@reddit

https://share.google/wma15WUZPY8TT4ZzC

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qualityvote2@reddit

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