As might have been expected, there were many suicides some of them while insane, and other violent deaths are recorded which do not imply misconduct of any kind. Several prisoners were shot in attempts to escape. Inquests were held in all such cases, but the usual verdict was “Justifiable homicide,” or “No criminality,” and the case went no further than the coroner’s court. In some instances the sentries were brought before a civil tribunal, this probably depending on whether the death took place within the precincts of the prison or outside. Inquests were held in the following cases. One night in 1812, a prisoner carrying a bucket asked leave to pass a sentry on guard at one of the inner gates (that of the Court in front of the casern, in which the prisoners were confined after sunset), saying that he wanted to get some water. He apparently passed through, and threw the contents of the bucket, which was actually _full_ of water at the time, into the face of the sentry, who dropped his firelock; the prisoner picked it up, and unscrewed and ran off with the bayonet. The sentry, taking up the firelock, fired and severely wounded the prisoner, who for some reason or other was taken not to the prison hospital, but to the Huntingdon Infirmary, where he died. The sentry was tried for manslaughter and acquitted. At the Hunts Lent Assizes 1812, Timothy Wood, aged thirty-three, was tried for shooting a French prisoner of war at Norman Cross, the Grand Jury finding no true bill. The victim was probably the man whose certificate, one among a bundle of fifty-six, registers as the cause of death, “Wound, Manslaughter, verdict by Coroner’s inquest.” The prisoner may actually have died outside the Depot, for the date corresponds with the probable date when the mother of the donor to the Peterborough Museum of the wine slides with paper decoration saw the prisoner shot as he was scaling the boundary wall. He probably dropped on the outside. Among the causes of accidental death are several entries, “Fall from hammock”; these cases, there is too much reason to fear, were those of the poor debilitated, starving prisoners—victims, according to the French, of British cruelty, according to the British, of their own vice. Commissioner Serle was sent down to ascertain what foundation there was for the French complaints, and he reports as follows: “I have been informed by some who are most qualified to know, that the French prisons have never had so few sick as at the present time. Some, indeed, who had sported away their allowance in gambling, to prevent which the agents have taken every precaution in their power, are in fact destitute enough, and so they might have been, if their ration had been ten times as great.” (Commissioner Serle, 25th July 1800.) These instances will throw as much light on this side of the prison life as if they were multiplied indefinitely.