Lydford Law is a genuinely and nationally significant piece of English legal and linguistic history, the phrase itself surviving into wider English usage well beyond Devon as shorthand for arbitrary or backwards justice, giving this entry an unusually broad cultural footprint compared with most of this register's more purely local traditions.
Richard Strode's own well documented 1510 imprisonment is a matter of genuine parliamentary and legal history, his case later cited in debates over parliamentary privilege, the principle that MPs should be protected from punishment for actions taken in the course of their parliamentary duties, giving Lydford's grim reputation a real and constitutionally significant historical consequence beyond the immediate injustice done to Strode himself.
The castle's own physical design, its tower's ground floor deliberately buried to create an underground pit for the lowest status prisoners, gives this tradition an unusually concrete architectural expression of the harsh justice it represents, the building itself standing as physical evidence of the very reputation that gave rise to the phrase Lydford Law.
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