This owner was not seldom exacting, and his claim was met in characteristic English fashion. The coroner's jury returned the value of the deodand at next to nothing, _e.g._, "a horse, value three shillings," and the Court of "King's Bench" refused to disturb the finding. Hence one absurdity balanced another, and the doctrine was long defended. In 1820, Joseph Chitty, in his standard work on _Prerogatives_, maintains that "the forfeiture is rational so far as it strengthens the natural sensation of the mind at the sudden destruction of human life." But in later years these mediæval ghosts began to walk again to some purpose. In 1840 the London and Birmingham Railway Company was amerced in £2000 as a deodand! Railway directors were no doubt convinced that 9 and 10 Vic., c. 62, which in 1846 made an end of the whole business, came not a day too soon. Had the law of twenty years before that been restored, there might have been some warrant for stripping those same directors of all their property after each railway accident, and one shudders to think of the consequences had the coroner's jury found the plant used not _per infortunium_. One thing must be added, many held that the instruments of a murder, though forfeited to the Crown, were not, properly speaking, deodands, and they quoted as illustration the curious case of one Rempston, who forced his boat's crew to row under London Bridge _invitis corum dentibus_ in dangerous weather. He was thrown out and drowned, and the jury, it was said, brought in a verdict of _felo de se_, to save the boat from forfeiture. But the weight of authority was emphatically against this view. THE LAW OF THE FOREST "A stretch of land, thick planted with trees;" so you picture a forest to yourself, but old English law held otherwise. There were miles of woodland that were not forest at all, and acres of pasture that were. John Manwood, the Elizabethan lawyer, still our chief authority on the subject, defines it as "a certain territory of woody grounds and fruitful pastures, privileged for wild beasts and fowls of forest, chase, and warren, to rest and abide in under the safe protection of the king." Such a preserve was exactly delimited, and might contain villages, churches, and so forth, within its bounds, as the New Forest does to-day. The king had certain rights over all, yet it was mainly private property; nay, there might be spaces in it, but not of it,--within its Bounds, but not within its Regard, as the phrase ran,--and so exempt from its peculiar laws. Manwood gives a picturesque, though quite erroneous derivation of the term: it was _For Rest_ of the wild beasts; but a sounder etymology traces the word to _foris_ (= outside), for that it was outside the jurisdiction of the Common Law, and had codes, courts, and officers of its own. The whole business was for centuries alike insult and wrong to the Commons of England.