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Armorie v. Delamirie (1722) K.B., 1 Strange 505, 93 ER 664 |
| | Armory is considered “one of the first instances of spoliation of evidence. Under this evidentiary rule, courts presume that evidence a party has concealed or destroyed would have been injurious to their case, based on the interpretive canon omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem, ('all things' against the spoliator of the evidence). See Ariel Porat, Liability Under Uncertainty: Evidential Deficiency and the Law of Torts 11 (2001); Margaret M. Koesel et al, Spoliation of Evidence ix-x (2006). |
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> | Though it may not have been the court's intention, the great disparity in wealth and status between the two parties underscores the two rules announced in this case -- that one who finds property, even a climbing boy, holds title in it against the world, even the King's Silversmith, and that anyone who spoliates evidence, even one in so comparatively reputable a position as De Lamirie was compared to Armorie, will have all things presumed against him. |
| | Interpellating Armory: Chimney Sweeps and their Apprentices
Legal historian A.W. Brian Simpson has this to say about the problem of tracking down Armory, the chimney sweep's apprentice: |
| | Short of finding the climbing boy at the center of this case, this section tries to do the next best thing -- to gather as much information as possible that is likely to describe someone in Armory's position. |
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< | Relevant Historiography |
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> | Historiography |
| | Kathleen H. Strange, Climbing Boys: A Study of Sweeps' Apprentices, 1773-1875 (1982), Ch. 2 |
| | "Chimney-sweepers' apprentices, for example, loom large in the popular historical imagination but were very small in number. Much of their high visibility resulted from the campaigning of Jonas Hanway in the eighteenth century and Lord Shaftesbury and Charles Kingsley in the nineteenth [in the 1863 novel The Water Babies]. In 1841, the number of sweeps' apprentices aged below 10 in London was estimated by Mayhew to be 370 (at a time when London's population numbered 2.2 million). Hanway estimated that in 1785 there were 400 to 550 climbing boys in London, and an estimate from seven years later supposed their number to be 500. . . According to the census of 1851, there were 1107 British chimney-sweeps aged below 15 in Britain." |
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> | The Mechanics of Climbing
Mayhew records these comments on technique from a chimney sweep living in Bethnal Green in the 1840s:
"There are two or three ways of climbing. In wide flues, you climb with your elbows and your legs spread out, your feet pressing against the sides of the flue, but in narrow flues, such as nine-inch ones, you must slant it; you must have your sides in the angles, it's widest there, and go up that way."
Mayhew describes:
"Here he threw himself into position -- placing one arm close to his side, with the palm of his hand turned outwards, as if pressing the side of the flue, and extending the other arm high above his head, the hand apparently pressing in the same manner."
Here are two sketchs of four boys in various flue-cleaning positions, and another of four boys in adjacent flues. |
| | Scrotum Cancer
Soot and the chemicals it contained led to a notably high rate of scrotal cancer among chimney sweep's boys. |
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> | In a statement to the Children's Employment Commission (1863), Thomas Clarke, Master Sweep of Nottingham remarked:
"I have known eight or nine sweeps lost their lives by the sooty cancer. The private parts which is seizes are entirely eaten off caused entirely by 'sleeping black,' and breathing the soot in all night." |
| | Brown & Thornton, Percivall Pott & Chimney Sweepers' Cancer of the Scrotum (1957)
Pott's 1775 treatise, Chirurgical observations Relative to the Cataract, the Polypus of the Nose, the Cancer of the Scrotum, . . . [etc.], which includes an account of scrotum cancer among chimney sweepers has been cited as the first description of an occupational cancer: |
| | ". . . in spite of every other condition which may be regarded as favourable to the disease, including the employment of children as 'climbing boys,' it is really almost unknown in those countries." |
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> | Here's an image of a German chimney sweep, suited up and bearing a striking resemblance to a ninja. |
| | Walter Jacobson, Diseases of the Male Organs of Generation (1893)
Jacobson argues against Butlin's belief in the protective properties of specialized clothing and also departs from medical consensus holding that improved sweeping technology has reduced the incidence of cancer by allowing one to sweep from below rather than inside the chimney. Instead, Jacobson proposes:
"A more important explanation than the intersection of machinery, is to be found in the fact that chimney-sweeps, being no longer employed in boyhood, the delicate scrotal skin is not exposed so early or so long to the irritation of soot." |
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< | Climbing Boys in Literature and Art |
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> | The Art of Sweeping |
| | William Blake published two versions of his poem "The Chimney Sweep," once in Songs of Innocence (1789) and then in Songs of Experience (1794). |
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< | Here's an image of some climbing boys, still black with soot, tucking into a meal and some ale. |
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> | Here's an of some climbing boys, still black with soot, tucking into a meal with some ale. |
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A recent image of a Sweep's Apprentice
Another image |
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< | An image of a widow selling her son into an apprenticeship with a chimney sweep. |
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> | An image of a widow selling her son into an apprenticeship with a chimney sweep. |
| | Paul De Lamerie |
| | Since it came down, the case has appeared in legal treatises on property, evidence, and tort law, judicial opinions, and case books on property law. |
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< | Here's a 2007 article by a barrister who advocates overturning the Armory rule because negligent lawyers now risk getting caught in a net designed for dishonest goldsmiths. |
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> | Application of the Armory rule has broadened over time. Here's a 2007 article by a barrister who advocates overturning the Armory rule because negligent lawyers now risk getting caught in a net designed for dishonest goldsmiths. |
| | Occasionally, one can even find an Armory v. Delamirie memorabilia print available for auction on ebay.
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