While rings have favoured the living, they have also been the means of recognising the dead. An instance of this is related in the history of the great Duke of Burgundy, renowned for the splendour of his court and his love of jewels. He died in the battle of Nanci, and his body was not found until three days afterwards, when it was recognised by one of the Duke’s household by a ring and other precious jewels upon it; otherwise the corpse was so disfigured that it could not have been identified. The body of the great naval commander Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was shipwrecked on the rocks of Scilly in 1707, was washed on shore, when some fishermen, it is said, having stolen a valuable emerald ring, buried the corpse. The ring, being shown about, made a great noise over the island, and was the cause of the discovery and ultimate removal of the body to Westminster Abbey. Another account is that which was published under the authority of the Earl of Romney, grandson of Sir Cloudesley Shovel. Some years after the fatal shipwreck, an aged woman confessed to the parish minister of St. Mary’s on her deathbed that, exhausted with fatigue, one man who had survived the disaster reached her hut, and that she had murdered him to secure the valuable property on his person. This worst of wreckers then produced a ring taken from the finger of her victim, and it was afterwards identified as one presented to Sir Cloudesley Shovel by Lord Berkeley. William Trotter, of an ancient family on the Scottish border, is recorded to have fallen at the battle of Flodden; and, in corroboration of the fact, a gold ring was found about the middle of the last century, upon the site of the field of battle, bearing an inscription in Norman-French, having between each word a boar’s head, the armorial bearings of the Trotters. Martius, in ‘Titus Andronicus,’ when he falls into a dark pit, discovers the body of Bassianus, by the light of the jewel on the dead man’s hand:-- Upon his bloody finger he doth wear A precious ring, that lightens all the hole, Which, like a taper in some monument, Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks, And shows the rugged entrails of this pit: So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus, When he by night lay bath’d in human blood. I may mention the employment of rings for criminal purposes, such as their use for concealing poison, of which we have instances in past ages, and in late times. Hannibal, we are told, from a fear of being delivered up to the Romans by Prusius, King of Bithynia, swallowed poison, which, to be prepared for the worst, he carried with him in the hollow of a ring. To this Juvenal alludes in his Tenth Satire:-- Nor swords, nor spears, nor stones from engines hurl’d, Shall quell the man whose frown alarm’d the world; The vengeance due to Cannæ’s fatal field, And floods of human gore--a ring shall yield.