Thus the famous presentation of circumstantial evidence to the modern imagination in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Silver Blaze. Following this exchange, Holmes deduces from the circumstance of the dog's nocturnal silence the fact that it must have known whomever entered the stables when a prized horse went missing; he is therefore able to narrow his field of suspects. His less perspicacious foil Detective Gregory fails to appreciate the full consequence of this curious circumstance – for Gregory, as Holmes laments, is not “gifted with imagination.” As is typical of circumstantial evidence, the issue here turns on the discernment of acts no longer to be seen: the truth of what happened can only be constructed from inferences made after the event. The problem posed by the fate of the horse with the silver blaze is one that the Old English law-writers would have appreciated, concerned as their codes are with animals stolen, straying, or disappearing only to re-appear in the form of their butch-ered and hidden remains. But (in the absence of a reliable witness to the moment of disappearance) how would the pre-Conquest English subject and legal process have gone about solving this or an equivalent crime? Were public oaths or recourse to oath-helpers, and submission to the hot iron or boiling water, their only practical methods of arriving at the truth? Or might they have made use of our modern detective's methods – the application of reasoning, logic and imagination to what material evidence remains (or is significantly absent)? This chapter makes an argument for the importance of the role of circumstantial evidence in the truth-seeking endeavors of the Old English legal system, and finds traces even in the decrees of the law codes to suggest that this approach to discovery was a widespread and accepted one in the legal field, adapted to a range of criminal and legal circumstances. The same interest in deliberate observation and telling inference emerges too in Old English poetry, which reveals in some of its narratives a dramatic reliance upon analogous truth-finding processes – Beowulf is the chosen exemplar here.