The immediate precursors of Blackstone's ratio in English law were articulations by Hale (about 100 years earlier) and Fortescue (about 200 years before that), both influential jurists in their time. Hale wrote: "for it is better five guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should die." Fortescue's "De Laudibus Legum Angliae" (c. 1470) states that "one would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally."