I just finished reading The Plain English Guide by Martin Cutts this weekend. Good little book. A couple of his passages jumped out at me quoting complaints about legal writing from the 15th and 19th centuries. I thought they would be worth sharing.

• "In 1550, after only three years on the throne of England, Edward VI had become so exasperated with the law that he remarked: 'I would wish that the superfluous and tedious statutes were made more plain and short, to the intent that men might better understand them.'"
• "'Excrementitious garbage' was how Jeremy Bentham described legal English in the nineteenth century."

Good to know that we've been consistent over the centuries.