rhaps only be deemed instruments in the hands of higher powers.
Extracts from the "Coroners' Rolls," containing accounts of robberies and
street frays in this reign and the preceding, prove this fact, and afford
in addition curious evidence of the state of society at that period. For
the quaint and amusing details they give, we must render thanks to the
learned and skilled in antiquarian lore, obsolete orthography, black
letter type, &c., but, for whose assistance in rescuing them from
obscurity, and interpreting their meaning, they must to us have remained
veiled in an impenetrable incognita.

Amongst them is the record of an "inquisition made of the fire raised in
Jewry," and a "precept given to apprehend all the felons concerned."
Another is so graphic, that we feel able to see the whole picture it
gives at a glance--the widow sitting beside the bier of her husband, the
sanctity of her sorrow invaded by brute violence, the house pillaged, and
the corpse plundered and burnt in the agonised wife's presence. The
words of the roll say, "Katharina, the wife of Stephen Justice, accused
Ralph, son of Robert Andrew, the gaoler, William Kirby Gaunter, William
Crede, Walter de Hereham, John, servant of Nicholas de Ingham, and
Nicholas sometime servant of Nicholas de Sopham, and Nicholas de Gayver,
that when she was at peace with God and the king, in the house of Stephen
Justice her husband, and the Thursday night after the feast of King
Edmund, in the forty-eighth year of the reign of King Henry, the son of
King John (1263), they came in the town of Norwich, in Fybriggate, St.
Clement's, and broke the oaken gates, and the hooks and the hinges of
iron, with hatchets, bars, wedges, swords, knives, and maces, and flung
them down into the court, and feloniously entered; that they then broke
the pine wood doors of the hall, and the hinges and iron work of them,
and the chains, bolts, and oaken boards of the windows. Afterwards they
entered the door of the hall chamber towards the south, and robbed that
chamber of two swords, value 3_s._ 6_d._, one ivory handled anlace, value
12_d._, one iron head piece, value 10_d._, an iron staff, value 4_d._;
one cow leather quirre (cuirass) with iron plates, value half a mark; and
one wambeis (a body garment stuffed with cotton, wool, or tow), and
coming thence into the hall, they burnt the body of her husband, as it
there lay upon a bier, together with a blanket of 'reins,' value 3_s._;
and t