Fire, the second of Fitz Stephen's 'plagues,' played its part in preventing over-population, as might be expected when the framework of the huts was of wood, the roof of thatch and the floor covered with straw or rushes. If a woman went to bed leaving a lighted candle stuck on the wall it was hardly surprising if she paid for her carelessness with her life, but as a rule the victims were children or very old people, and as often as not the immediate cause was some chicken, or pig, or calf getting on to the open hearth and scattering the fire on to the straw-covered floor. For the mediæval peasant shared his hut with his live stock, though it would not be often that a man would be called upon to separate two horses fighting in his kitchen; this did actually happen to a man in Winchester, and as usual the peacemaker got the worst of it. Fire, again, acting indirectly through the medium of water, was another frequent cause of disaster, a most astonishing number of cases occurring of persons, usually children, scalded to death. I can only suppose that the cauldrons were large and insecurely balanced; that they were large may be concluded from the frequency with which people fell into them. But cold water was perhaps as deadly an agent as any. In Yorkshire in particular the coroners' rolls suggest that the number of people that fell off bridges and out of boats into streams and down wells must have seriously interfered with the purity of the water supply; but, fortunately, water was very rarely drunk in those days. The most frequent cause of drowning seems to have been falling off a horse, and the mediæval version of the well-known proverb ought to have been 'One man can ride a horse to the water, but nine out of ten can't stay on when he drinks.' Taking the number of cases in which men watering their horses did get drowned, and allowing that a reasonable percentage of those thrown into the water scrambled out again, the standard of mediæval riding must have been about equal to that of the White Knight, who, when his horse stopped fell over its head, and when it went on again fell over its tail. Occasionally the propelling agent, so to speak, was human, as in the case of a clothworker of Tadcaster, who, 'being annoyed with his wife,' flung her into the Wharfe and drowned her. The measure seems extreme, and he could not plead peril of shipwreck, the excuse of the Syracusan, who, 'when all ponderous things were to be exonerated out of the ship,' flung his wife into the sea 'because she was the greatest burden.'