From time to time, when some undesirable alien is arrested for stabbing an enemy or chance acquaintance who has annoyed him, the police-court magistrate before whom he is brought will comment, with patriotic pride, on the 'un-English' nature of the offence. And it is true that at the present time the Englishman as a rule emphasises his disagreement with his opponent by means of fist or hob-nailed boot rather than with a knife, but this was certainly not so in mediæval times. Call a man 'a boor' nowadays and you may get a black eye, but the results were more disastrous in the thirteenth century, as John Marsh found when he applied that opprobrious term to Richard Fraunkfee as they were walking back from church at Doncaster, for Richard promptly knifed him. Every man in those days carried a knife, dagger, anelace, or baselard, and produced it without hesitation if angered. Needless to say, the knife was much in evidence after harvest feasts, wakes, and especially visits to the tavern, for drunkenness has been an English vice since Fitz Stephen, in the twelfth century, spoke of 'the inordinate drinking of fools' as one of the two plagues of London. How far this failing was common to both sexes I do not know; casual references to women in taverns occur occasionally, but they might have been there as blamelessly as their descendants in a modern tea-shop, and, so far as I can remember, I have only come across one woman who met her death when drunk--a Yorkshire woman who fell down a well. At the same time, seeing that 'the good wyf taugte hir dougter' in the fifteenth century that 'if thou be ofte drunke it falle thee to schame,' it looks as if occasional excess might have been condoned. With the exception of drunkenness, the moving cause of the innumerable murderous assaults is rarely given, and it is rather curious that the only two cases which I have found of men quarrelling, with fatal results, over a woman both occurred at ironworks in Yorkshire in 1266. [Illustration: '_... got his arms round a branch._']