Study manual

System by the Magistrates’ Courts Act, 1963 which provided for the 3-tier Court 
system consisting of the High Court; District Court and Primary Court. It goes 
without saying that the history and development of the English Common Law is 
as relevant to England as it is for Tanzania. 
 

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38 
 
History of the English Law of Torts
 
 
READ: 
(1) WIGMORE, "Responsibility for Tortious Acts: Its History" (1894), 7 
Harvard Law Review, 315, 383, 441; 
(2) GREGORY, "Trespass to Negligence to Absolute Liability", (1951) 37 Va. 
L.Re 359; 
(3) Malone, "Ruminations on the Role of fault in the History of the Common 
Law of Tort", (1970) 31 La. L.Rev. 1; 
(4) Fifoot, History and source of the Common Law; 
(5) Kiralfy, Action on the Case (1951);
(6) Clyne J's judgement in WALMSLEY V. HUMENIC K, [1954] 2 D.L.R. 232 
(BC. S.C.)], 
Origin of the Law of Tort lies in a primitive (meaning ancient) English Legal 
System, by which all wrongs were redressed by private revenge. This was a 
system of self-redress, based on the principle of retaliation. Such savage 
retaliation did not constitute law, but was the germ from which the penal law 
and law of tort gradually developed: 
 
NELSON, R. A., 
Indian Penal Code
, 6th edition, Law Book Co., Allhabad, 
1970. 
 
 

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39 
In feudal Britain of the medieval period [period from 4th Century to about 15th 
Century] rights which a person had in land determined his status and