Did you know that there is a law in Britain that prohibits people from dying while in the houses of parliament?

That law has topped the list of the most ludicrous pieces of legislation in a poll held by a television channel.

Nearly 4,000 people selected the ludicrous laws from a shortlist of bizarre rules in the poll conducted by UKTV Gold.

Experts say that the law that prohibits people from dying while in the Houses of Parliament is actually a bizarre misunderstanding of a genuinely anachronistic law still on the statute books.

The 1887 Coroners Act, re-enacted by the 1988 Coroners Act, created a separate Coroner of the Queens Household. He still has to hold the inquest into the death of anyone whose body is lying “within the limits of any of the Queen’s palaces; or within the limits of any other house where Her Majesty is then residing”.

As parliament is still classed as a royal palace, any death of an MP would in theory have required members of the royal household to sit as the coroner’s jury. As this would have raised all sorts of questions of parliamentary privilege, the polite convention arose that no parliamentarian dies until they are safely in the ambulance to a hospital.

Last year, the Law Society revealed other bizarre laws that are still in existence on the statute book. They included a ban on firing a cannon close to a dwelling house, a ban on the use of any slide upon ice or snow, and the prohibition of driving cattle through the streets of London.

UK'S MOST RIDICULOUS LAWS

*It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament
*It is treason to place a postage stamp bearing the king or queen’s image upside-down
*It is illegal for a woman to be topless in Liverpool
except as a clerk in a tropical fish store
*Eating mince pies on Christmas Day is banned
*If someone knocks on your door in Scotland and requires use of your toilet, you must let them enter
*A pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere, including in a policeman’s helmet
*The head of any dead whale found on the British coast is the property of the King, the tail the Queen’s
*It is legal to murder a Scotsman in York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow