An object or animal causally responsible for someone’s injury or death and, in older systems of law, thereby forfeit from its owner to the Church or State. People often hold that past involvement in a significant event confers a special status on an otherwise undistinguished object: witness the extra value attached to the very guitar some celebrity used, or the horror that might be excited by the very weapon once used for some dark deed. The legal status was however abolished in both Britain and the USA in the nineteenth century when railway companies protested that their large and expensive engines had become the principal candidates for forfeiture. See also piacular.