For the origin of the custom one must go far back. In Hebrew, Greek, and Roman legislation, the physical object that caused the loss of human life was held accursed, and hence was destroyed or forfeited. In England a thing became a deodand only when the coroner's jury (or more rarely some other authority) had found it the cause of death; which death, moreover, must happen within a year and a day of the accident. If it did, the thing was seized, no matter where it was, or who had it. In default of delivery the township was liable, and it was the Sheriff's duty to get the value therefrom. If a man had _per infortunium_ (or without blame) used the article, the jury found that as a fact, and he was acquitted, or rather pardoned; but in strict law his goods were forfeit as late as 1828. And not everything causing death was a deodand. If a man fell into the water, was carried under a mill-wheel, and perished, the wheel was forfeit but not the mill. The distinction was sometimes difficult. Here are two actual examples. A cart and a waggon came into collision; the man in the cart was pitched out under the waggon-wheels and died. The two vehicles, all they held, the horses that drew them, were adjudged deodands, "because they all moved _ad mortem_." Again, a ship was hauled up for repairs, toppled over on a shipwright at work, and was declared forfeit. Your mediæval lawyer was nothing if not subtle, and he soon raised doubts enough to gravel a schoolman. He questioned if things fixed to the freehold could become deodands. Suppose a man were ringing a church bell, and the rope, getting twisted round his windpipe in some strange fashion, choked the life out of him: how then? The rope seemed past praying for, but what about the bell? The learned differed, yet all agreed that if the timber holding the bell got loose, and came crashing down on the sexton, the royal treasury, of clear right, pounced on rope, and bell, and timber. How furiously, with what a wealth of legal learning and invention, one fancies the utter barristers must have "mooted" those fascinating points after supper in the halls of their ancient Inns!