Britain used to put killer objects on trial. Then the railways cameHow the Railways Killed a Medieval Law

In 1829, hundreds of spinners and weavers packed into the Norfolk Arms Hotel for a meeting when the floor gave way, dropping the crowd two storeys into the cellar. Thirty people died.

Afterwards a jury priced the splintered timbers that had been the floor: 5 shillings, to be divided among the families of the dead. This was the deodand, Latin for 'that which must be given to God'. Any moveable possession that directly killed a person was valued and forfeited to the king.

Even a ladder counted

The rules were a mess. A church bell falls on someone? Not a deodand, because a bell counts as real estate. Fall off a ladder? The ladder is a deodand, even though you were the one moving. A drunk dancing on the top step dies, and the ladder is still guilty.

Run over by a cart and only one wheel might be assessed; slip on a cart pole and the whole cart, load and horses were seized. The jury decided, and local opinion, sympathy or a wish for revenge could sway it.

A locomotive costs too much

Railways broke the logic. Get hit by a train and nobody disputes that a moving object did it — but the object is a brand-new locomotive, not a cracked barrel a local merchant can pay for.

During the Industrial Revolution juries began valuing deodands high, and sometimes said outright that they would drop the whole matter if the industrialist provided for the dead person's family.

In 1846 the deodand was abolished, which was called progress. But as Harry Smith argues, the real effect was to protect the railway companies: families of uninsured passengers, careless trespassers and railway workers killed on the job lost even the smallest compensation.

Some scholars now propose the deodand as a framework for the legal rights of nature. The sharper question: what would a medieval jury do with an AI that encouraged someone to kill themselves?