Answer: (As far as we know) 1314, following a proclamation of Edward II, who wanted to maintain peace and good order while he was away fighting the Scots. Notably, 1314 was also the year of his disastrous defeat at Bannockburn.

Answer: Six days imprisonment.

Answer: Two inches: ‘No knight under the rank of a lord, esquire or gentleman, nor any other person, shall wear any shoes or boots having spikes or points which exceed the length of two inches’.

Answer: True. Following the 1266 Assize of Bread and Ale, the weight of a loaf of bread was set according to the price of wheat.

Answer: Blinding and castration. This was reduced in the 1217 Forest Charter to a fine, or imprisonment.

Answer: The Queen, who has a right to it according to the 1322 Statute Prerogativa Regis. She probably won’t want it, but it’s nice to offer.

Answer: Edward II. In this period Edward was teetering on the brink of being deposed by a group of powerful nobles, so it was probably a sensible enactment.

Answer: ‘Peine forte et dure’. In other words, crushing until the suspect changes their mind, or dies.

Answer: Eyres. The name comes from the Latin verb ‘errare’, ‘to wander’. By extension, this Latin word can also mean ‘to make a mistake’ because the person making this mistake has wandered away from the right path (or as we say in English has ‘made an error’). People who knew Latin in the twelfth century very much enjoyed making this pun at the expense of the ‘justices of error’.

Answer: By the latter half of the twelfth century between one third and one quarter of England was royal forest.

Answer: Innocent. The holy water had received them, rather than rejected them. They were of course pulled out before they drowned.

Answer: 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council.

Answer: Archery practice.