At one time or other you have looked, one supposes, into that huge collection of curiosities and horrors known as the State Trials. You may possibly have noted the form of indictment in the murder cases; and if so, one odd detail must have impressed you. Having set forth the weapon used by the murderer, the document invariably goes on to estimate its money value: for, having been instrumental in taking human life, it was forfeit to the Crown, and it or its price had to be duly accounted for. It was called a Deodand, but the name was applied to many things besides arms used with malice aforethought. Thus, a man died by misadventure: then was the material cause active or passive? For instance, his end might come because a tree fell on him, or because he fell from a tree, in either case the wood was a deodand, and so forfeited. The name is from Deo dandum—a thing that must be offered to God, and this because in early mediÆval times the Church or the poor had the ultimate benefit.

For the origin of the custom one must go far back. In Hebrew, Greek, and Roman legislation, the physical object that caused the loss of human life was held accursed, and hence was destroyed or forfeited. In England a thing became a deodand only when the coroner's jury (or more rarely some other authority) had found it the cause of death; which death, moreover, must happen within a year and a day of the accident. If it did, the thing was seized, no matter where it was, or who had it. In default of delivery the township was liable, and it was the Sheriff's duty to get the value therefrom. If a man had per infortunium (or without blame) used the article, the jury found that as a fact, and he was acquitted, or rather pardoned; but in strict law his goods were forfeit as late as 1828. And not everything causing death was a deodand. If a man fell into the water, was carried under a mill-wheel, and perished, the wheel was forfeit but not the mill. The distinction was sometimes difficult. Here are two actual examples. A cart and a waggon came into collision; the man in the cart was pitched out under the waggon-wheels and died. The two vehicles, all they held, the horses that drew them, were adjudged deodands, "because they all moved ad mortem." Again, a ship was hauled up for repairs, toppled over on a shipwright at work, and was declared forfeit. Your mediÆval lawyer was nothing if not subtle, and he soon raised doubts enough to gravel a schoolman. He questioned if things fixed to the freehold could become deodands. Suppose a man were ringing a church bell, and the rope, getting twisted round his windpipe in some strange fashion, choked the life out of him: how then? The rope seemed past praying for, but what about the bell? The learned differed, yet all agreed that if the timber holding the bell got loose, and came crashing down on the sexton, the royal treasury, of clear right, pounced on rope, and bell, and timber. How furiously, with what a wealth of legal learning and invention, one fancies the utter barristers must have "mooted" those fascinating points after supper in the halls of their ancient Inns!

The decisions were hard to reconcile. Thus, in Edward the Third's time, it was held that if a man fall to his death from his horse against the trunk of a tree, the horse is forfeit, but not the tree. But in the same reign a distinction was drawn. One William Daventry, a servant to John Blaburgh, engaged in watering a horse, was grievously hurt. He was carried to his master's house "apud Fleet Street in suburbio London", and there at even he died. At first the horse was adjudged a deodand, but Blaburgh got the inquisition quashed on the ground that the horse had not thrown his rider. Again, if a lad under fourteen fell from a cart and was killed, there was no deodand: as some opined, because the masses might be dispensed with, in the case of one presumed sinless from his tender age, and the proper end of deodands was to procure masses; but others urged it was "because he was not of discretion to look to himself." The further question—what possible difference this could make—was not raised; for even a mediÆval lawyer's speculation must stop somewhere. But how if the slayer were a lad? A Cornish case, temp. 1302, supplies an answer. Jack of Burton, a boy of twelve, had a mind to draw the bow. He rigged up a target in a house, and shot thereat from the outside. One arrow missed the mark, and, glancing off a hook, transfixed a woman called Rose. Rose died forthwith, and Jack fled in horror. It was held that le Hoke was a deodand, but that the boy, on account of his age, was no whit to blame, and (with a touch of kindliness) a proclamation was made far and wide that he might return in safety. In this connection one recalls the awkward misadventure of Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of James I., who, being out a-hunting, killed, by pure accident, Peter Hawkins, his keeper. He had many enemies, and all sorts of ecclesiastical and temporal penalties were threatened: at least, it was said, let all his goods be confiscate. But the King turned a deaf ear to these suggestions: he comforted the unlucky prelate with kindly words, and a full pardon, dated 26th September 1621, removed all possible danger from his reverend person.

If a man met his death afloat, there was deodand or no deodand as the water was fresh or salt, for these rules had no force on the high seas or in tidal rivers: because, said some, "there were so many deaths at sea." "Nay," said others, "how forfeit the ocean?" "But at least," it was replied, "one could take the ship"——but here again speculation must stop. Although deodands first went to the Crown, and were properly applied to pious or charitable uses, yet they were often granted to lords of manors: so often, indeed, that one of the few references to them in English literature—a couplet in Samuel Butler's Hudibras—treats this as the general rule.

This owner was not seldom exacting, and his claim was met in characteristic English fashion. The coroner's jury returned the value of the deodand at next to nothing, e.g., "a horse, value three shillings," and the Court of "King's Bench" refused to disturb the finding. Hence one absurdity balanced another, and the doctrine was long defended. In 1820, Joseph Chitty, in his standard work on Prerogatives, maintains that "the forfeiture is rational so far as it strengthens the natural sensation of the mind at the sudden destruction of human life." But in later years these mediÆval ghosts began to walk again to some purpose. In 1840 the London and Birmingham Railway Company was amerced in £2000 as a deodand! Railway directors were no doubt convinced that 9 and 10 Vic., c. 62, which in 1846 made an end of the whole business, came not a day too soon. Had the law of twenty years before that been restored, there might have been some warrant for stripping those same directors of all their property after each railway accident, and one shudders to think of the consequences had the coroner's jury found the plant used not per infortunium.

One thing must be added, many held that the instruments of a murder, though forfeited to the Crown, were not, properly speaking, deodands, and they quoted as illustration the curious case of one Rempston, who forced his boat's crew to row under London Bridge invitis corum dentibus in dangerous weather. He was thrown out and drowned, and the jury, it was said, brought in a verdict of felo de se, to save the boat from forfeiture. But the weight of authority was emphatically against this view.