of removing or avoiding the obstruction, he is responsible for the nuisance if he does not adopt those means. The test is not whether an obstruction has been caused, but whether the obstruction could reasonably have been avoided. I think, however, that this is not the sole test of whether a person is responsible for the nuisance caused by the assembly of a crowd of people, and that a more absolute liability rests upon the person whose business involves the gathering together of a crowd, or who, apart from any consideration of the bona fide conduct of his business, deliberately continues to gather the crowd. (citations omitted). Discussion The nuisance action began in twelfth century England as a criminal writ, belonging only to the Crown. It was used in cases that involved encroachments upon the King's land or the blocking of public roads or waterways. The King sought to punish these criminal infringements, commonly known as "purprestures", through criminal proceedings. Over time, activities prosecuted as public nuisances included everything from embezzling public funds to having a tiger pen next to a highway, from assisting a homicidal maniac to escape to placing a mutilated corpse on a doorstep, and from selling rotten meat to "subdividing houses to the point where they become 'overpestered' with the poor". As these examples demonstrate, early authority to commence public nuisance actions was derived from the sovereign's "police power". Spencer (1989 at 59) describes the offence as "a rag-bag of odds and ends which we should nowadays call 'public welfare offences. But the common feature of the crime is that members of the public suffer a common injury through interference with rights which they enjoy as citizens. The modern definition is found in paras 31–40 Archbold (2005): In Attorney General v PYA Quarries Ltd the issue was whether quarrying activities—which showered the neighbourhood with stones and splinters, and caused dust and vibrations—were a private nuisance affecting some of the residents (which would have been civil), but not a public nuisance affecting all Her Majesty's liege subjects living in the area. In his judgment Romer LJ concluded at p 184: Denning LJ. agreed, at p. 191, In R v Madden (1975) 1 WLR 1379 the defendant telephoned a bomb hoax to a steel works whose business was disrupted for about an hour. James LJ accepted that hoax telephone calls falsely asserting the presence of explosives could amount