English history[21] remembers the strange scene enacted in the monastery of Caen in 1087, when William the Conqueror lay dead there, and the ceremonials of his interment were interrupted by a weird appeal. Ascelin, the son of Arthur, loudly claimed as his, neither sold nor given, the land on which the church stood, and, forbidding the burial, he appealed to the dead to do him justice. More than one[22] old English poem turned its plot round the ancient canon law, by which a burial might be delayed for debt. The dead was arrestable: a law afterwards set aside, "for death dissolved all things." But in more codes than one death did not dissolve liability for the consequences of high treason. In Scotland,[23] in the year 1320, at the "black parliament" of Scone, several Scotsmen were convicted of conspiracy against King Robert the Bruce. Most of them were drawn, hanged, and beheaded. But a Scottish historian of the time tells us that Roger of Mowbray, one of the accused, having died before his trial, "his body was carried to the place, convicted of conspiracy, and condemned to be drawn by horses, hung on the gallows, and beheaded." It is to the credit of Bruce that he did not allow the corporal part of the sentence to be carried out, although many entries in the charter rolls[24] shew that the consequent escheats of the traitor's lands served to reward the loyalty of others. His body convicted of conspiracy! How came this singular procedure into Scottish practice? In England, towards the close of the fourteenth century, although escheats were not less keenly looked after than in Scotland--and that sometimes in cases[25] where men had died unconvicted,--the purpose of attainder appears to have been effected without the expedient of calling the dead to the bar. The dead, however, was convicted. In the case of Robert Plesyngton,[26] for instance, in 1397, the judgment of Parliament bore an express conviction of treason, "_noun-obstant la mort de dit Roberd_." In 1400, John, Earl of Salisbury, challenged for treason by Lord Morley, was killed before the day appointed for the duel. The court not only adjudged him a traitor,[27] but on grounds eked out by Roman law subjected his sureties in costs to his accuser--said costs including the handsome fee of 100s. and twelve yards of scarlet cloth to the lawyer Adam of Usk.[28]