human
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
gpt
, 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