In spite of a verdict of 'misadventure,' I cannot help feeling a little sceptical about an incident which took place at Bedford in 1220, when William the miller was driving certain Jews in his cart, and at the bridge the cart fell into the water and three Jews were drowned. As I read the story there came into my mind Sam Weller's conversation with Mr. Pickwick about his father's remarkable accident with the voters: '"Here and there it is a wery bad road," says my father. "'Specially near the canal, I think," says the gentleman.... You wouldn't believe it, sir, but on the wery day as he came down with them woters his coach was upset on that 'ere wery spot and every man on 'em was turned into the canal.' Occasionally, also, the victim was a voluntary one, as in the case of John Milner, who, with the contempt for consequences which we might expect from one of his name, jumped into the Ouse. The consequence for him was that he became what Mr. Mantalini called 'a demmed, moist, unpleasant corpse,' and the jury decided that he had acted 'by temptation of the Devil.' While they displayed a certain boldness in thus arraigning the Devil for procuring, aiding, and abetting a felony, they showed more discretion in another quarter, for when a man and his wife were found struck by lightning, where a modern jury would have declared it an 'act of God' the mediæval jury preferred the less dogmatic and more reasonable verdict that 'no one is suspected.' It is pleasant to note that in another instance, where the body of a man struck by lightning was first found by his wife, the jury expressly exonerated her, saying 'she is not suspected' (of having done it). I am not quite certain of the force of a verdict of 'by temptation of the Devil' in a case of suicide, but it seems to have been the half-way house between _felo-de-se_ and madness, to have been, in fact, the mediæval equivalent of that 'temporary insanity' which is the invariable verdict in modern times. The idea that a man must be mad to take his own life, and that therefore all suicides were insane, had not occurred to the mediæval mind, but they evidently felt that there were cases in which the suicide was not himself, although he was not sufficiently outside or beside himself to be considered an absolute lunatic. There are strange and grim little stories of madmen in some of these old records. One of these, not wanting in pathos in its evidence of good intentions diabolically twisted, tells how Robert de Bramwyk, a lunatic who had some lucid intervals (and was, therefore, probably not so closely guarded), in a fit of frenzy took his sister Denise, who had been deformed and hunchbacked from her birth, and, wishing to make her straight, cast her into a cauldron of hot water, and taking her out of this bath trampled upon her with his feet to straighten her limbs. [Illustration: '_... cast her into a cauldron._']