Sale is concerned with a transfer of the general property in goods for “a money consideration, called the price”.1 It is therefore about exchange and about the circulation of assets in a market-driven society that embraces equally consumer as well as commercial relationships. The common law of this country, unlike other systems, has not yielded to an institutional distinction between commercial law and private law.2 Sale of goods law absorbs, with some differentiation, transactions between merchants, between merchant and private individual and between private individuals. The unity of these diverse transactions, however, is sometimes precarious as allowance has to be made from time to time for different types.

Much of the early history of sales law is not to be found in a form readily accessible to lawyers. Apart from isolated earlier references, the cases do not emerge in the law reports until the beginning of the 18th century. The reported transactions are essentially non-mercantile in character and are preoccupied with warranty.3 The absorption of warranty, initially a tortious accessory of the goods, by contract law was firmly started off by Lord Mansfield.4 Yet, despite his great achievements in incorporating the law merchant into the common law, dependent to a great extent on his empanelling of special juries of merchants to take cognizance of mercantile custom, sales law did not develop in Lord Mansfield’s court.5 It lay outside, in the unrecorded proceedings of arbitrations and private settlements.

Sales law started to acquire its modern shape in a series of cases spanning the first three-quarters of the 19th century from Lord Ellenborough to Lord Blackburn. Their judicial styles range from the expeditious and business-like judgments of the