There was a lottery that gave you immunity from being arrested.

World History

G et-out-of-jail-free cards aren't exclusive to Monopoly. When Queen Elizabeth I found herself in need of funds to pay off the debts incurred by her father Henry VIII's reign, she began organizing England's first national lottery in 1567. One of the prizes was arguably worth more than money: immunity from being arrested.

Elizabeth had been reluctant to raise taxes on her subjects despite her plans of expanding England's naval forces and overseas expeditions, so she turned to a lottery instead. She wrote in a letter to Sir John Spencer in 1567, "It is expedient to have somme persons appointed of good trust to receave suche particular sommes as our subjects shall of their owne free disposition be ready to deliver upon the said lotterie."

For the price of 10 shillings (about 120 pounds today, high enough to be cost-prohibitive for many citizens in Elizabethan England), entrants were eligible for a top prize of 5,000 pounds (around 1.1 million pounds today). The top 11 winners received cash prizes, and anyone who entered received temporary immunity from arrest for all crimes other than felonies, piracy, and treason — though this protection was not always enforced. The winners of that first lottery have alas been lost to history, but one imagines they enjoyed their low-stakes crime spree as much as, if not more than, their cash prize.

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By the Numbers

Largest lottery jackpot in history

$2.04 billion

Odds of winning the Mega Millions lottery

1 in 290,472,336

Did you know?

A lottery helped fund the Great Wall of China.

The Great Wall of China spans 13,171 miles and was built over a period of more than 2,000 years, which is another way of saying it wasn't cheap. When the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) was working on it, they turned to a lottery system to help fund the project. Contestants didn't simply buy a ticket, however. They played a keno-like game of chance known as "the white pigeon game," named for the birds that carried results from one village to another. (In keno, players choose numbers ranging from one to 80 and hope that the numbers they selected are among the 20 that get drawn.) Other historical projects that were similarly funded (at least partially) include Roman roads, Ivy League schools, and the Continental Army.