Question

In fourteenth-century English common law, an action for breach of an informal oral agreement was generally barred by the doctrine of covenant, which required a plaintiff to produce a formal document bearing the defendant’s wax seal. To circumvent this evidentiary hurdle, plaintiffs began adapting the writ of trespass on the case—a remedy originally reserved for indirect physical damages caused by affirmative wrongful acts (misfeasance)—to encompass failures to fulfill contractual undertakings (nonfeasance). Early common law judges resisted this expansion, maintaining that passive failure to execute a promise lacked the element of physical harm characteristic of actionable trespass. However, by the late fifteenth century, the Court of King’s Bench recognized that when a promisor’s nonfeasance caused a promisee to incur financial loss through detrimental reliance, the resulting economic harm was sufficiently analogous to indirect physical injury to warrant recovery under trespass on the case, thereby laying the groundwork for the modern law of contract.

It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage that early common law judges initially rejected the application of trespass on the case to unperformed oral promises because these judges