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The Law’s Lumber Room




The rusty curb of old father antic--the law

                                   FALSTAFF




  The Law’s
  Lumber
  Room

  By
  Francis
  Watt

  Second Series

  John Lane, The Bodley Head
  London and New York
  mdcccxcviii




  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
  At the Ballantyne Press




Prefatory


_This is an entirely distinct book from the first series of the Law’s
Lumber Room. The subjects are of more general interest, they are
treated with greater fulness of detail, most are as much literary as
legal; but I have thought it best to retain the old name. No other
seemed so briefly and so truly descriptive of papers which tell what
the law and its ways once were, and what they have ceased, one may
reasonably suppose, for ever to be._

_I make two remarks. There is a great deal of hanging in this book;
that is only because those were hanging times. The law had no thought
of mending the criminal; it ended him in the most summary fashion. The
death of the chief actors was as inevitably the finish of the story as
it is in a modern French novel._

_Again, in pondering those memories of the past, one realises how much,
in other things than mechanical invention, our time is unlike all that
went before. This is not the commonplace it seems, for not easily do we
realise how far the change has gone._

              _Under the sway
  Of Death, the past’s enormous disarray
  Lies hushed and dark._

_Details such as make up this volume have this merit: they bring the
antique world before us, and the net result seems to be this: we lead
better lives, we are more just and charitable, perhaps less selfish
than our forefathers, but how to deny that something is lost? for life
is not so exciting, and our annals are anything but picturesque._

_These papers were originally published in_ The New Review, The Yellow
Book, _and_ The Ludgate. _I have made very considerable additions to
most of them, and all have been carefully revised._




Contents


                                      PAGE

  TYBURN TREE                            1

  PILLORY AND CART’S TAIL               45

  STATE TRIALS FOR WITCHCRAFT           68

  A PAIR OF PARRICIDES                  88

  SOME DISUSED ROADS TO MATRIMONY      116

  THE BORDER LAW                       152

  THE SERJEANT-AT-LAW                  185




Tyburn Tree

    Its Exact Position not known--Near the Marble Arch--Fanciful
    Etymologies--The Last Days of the Old-Time Criminal--Robert Dowe’s
    Bequest--Execution Eve--St. Sepulchre’s Bell--The Procession--St.
    Giles’s Bowl--At Tyburn--Ketch’s Perquisites--The Newgate
    Ordinary--The Executioner--Tyburn’s Roll of Fame--Catholic
    Martyrs--Cromwell’s Head--The Highwaymen--Lord Ferrers--Dr.
    Dodd--James Hackman--Tyburn in English Letters.


To-day you cannot fix the exact spot where Tyburn Tree raised its
uncanny form. To the many it was the most noteworthy thing about Old
London, yet while thousands who had gazed thereon in fascinated horror
were still in life, a certain vagueness was evident in men’s thoughts,
and, albeit antiquaries have keenly debated the _locus_, all the mind
is clouded with a doubt, and your carefully worked out conclusion is
but guesswork. There is reason manifold for this. Of old time the
populous district known as Tyburnia was wild heath intersected by
the Tyburn Brook, which, rising near Hampstead, crossed what is now
Oxford Street, hard by the Marble Arch, and so on to Chelsea and the
Thames. Somewhere on its banks was the Middlesex gallows. It may be
that as the tide set westward the site was changed. Again, the wild
heath is now thick with houses; new streets and squares have confused
the ancient landmarks; those who dwelt therein preferred that there
should not be a too nice identification of localities. How startling
the reflection that in the very place of your dining-room, thousands
of fellow-creatures had dangled in their last agonies! How rest at
ease in such a chamber of horrors? The weight of evidence favours (or
disfavours) No. 49 Connaught Square. The Bishop of London is ground
landlord here; and it is said that in the lease of that house granted
by him the fact is recorded that there stood the “Deadly Never-Green.”
Such a record were purely gratuitous, but the draftsman may have
made it to fix the identity of the dwelling. But to-day the Square
runs but to No. 47. Some shuffling of numerals has, you fancy, taken
place to baffle indiscreet research. However, you may be informed (in
confidence) that you have but to stand at the south-east corner of the
Square to be “warm,” as children say in their games.

Let these minutiæ go. Tyburn Tree stood within a gunshot to the
north-west of the Marble Arch. Its pictured shape is known from
contemporary prints. There were three tall uprights, joined at the
top by three cross-beams, the whole forming a triangle. It could
accommodate many patients at once, and there is some authority for
supposing that the beam towards Paddington was specially used for Roman
Catholics. In the last century the nicer age objected to it as an
eyesore; and it was replaced by a movable structure, fashioned of two
uprights and a cross-beam, which was set up in the Edgware Road at the
corner of Bryanston Street, and which, the grim work done, was stored
in the corner house, from whose windows the sheriffs superintended
executions. To accommodate genteel spectators there were just such
stands as you find on a racecourse, the seats whereof were let at
divers prices, according to the interest excited. In 1758, for Dr.
Henesey’s execution as arch-traitor, the rate rose to two shillings and
two and sixpence a seat. The Doctor was “most provokingly reprieved,”
whereat the mob in righteous indignation arose and wrecked the stands.
Mammy Douglas, a woman who kept the key of one of these stands, was
popularly known as “the Tyburn pew-opener.”

Fanciful etymologists played mad pranks with the name. In Fuller’s
_Worthies, Tieburne_ is derived on vague authority from “Tie” and
“Burne,” because the “poor Lollards” there “had their necks _tied_ to
the beame and their lower parts _burnt_ in the fire. Others” (he goes
on more sensibly) “will have it called from _Twa_ and _Burne_, that
is two rivulets, which it seems meet near the place.” And then it was
plainly a _Bourn_ whence no traveller returned! Most probably it is a
shortened form of _The_, or _At the Aye Bourne_ (= _’t Aye-bourne_ =
_Tyburn_) or Brook already denoted. Tyburn was not always London’s
sole or even principal place of execution. In early times people were
hanged as well as burned at Smithfield. The elms at St. Giles’s were
far too handy a provision to stay idle. At Tower Green was the chosen
spot for beheading your high-class criminal, and it was common to put
off a malefactor on the very theatre of his malefaction. There are few
spots in Old London which have not carried a gallows at one or other
time. Some think that certain elm-trees suggested the choice of Tyburn.
In the end it proved the most convenient of all, being neither too near
nor too far; and in the end its name came to have (as is common with
such words) a general application, and was applied at York, Liverpool,
Dublin, and elsewhere, to the place of execution.

To-day the criminal’s progress from cell to gallows is an affair of a
few minutes. To an earlier time this had savoured of indecent haste.
Then, the way to Tyburn, long in itself, was lengthened out by the
observance of a complicated ritual, some of it of ancient origin. Let
us follow “the poor inhabitant below” from the dock to the rope. To
understand what follows one must remember that two distinct sets of
forces acted on his mind:--on the one hand, the gloom of the prison,
the priest’s advice, the memory of mis-spent days, the horror of
doom; on the other, the reaction of a lawless nature against a cruel
code, the resolve to die game, the flattering belief that he was the
observed of all observers, and perhaps a secret conviction that the
unknown could be no worse than the known. According as the one set or
other prevailed he was penitent or brazen, the Ordinary’s darling or
the people’s joy. Well, his Lordship having assumed the black cap and
pronounced sentence of death, the convict was forthwith removed to the
condemned hold in Newgate. There he was heavily fettered, and, if of
any renown as a prison-breaker, chained to a ring in the ground. Escape
was not hopeless. Friends were allowed to visit and supply him with
money, wherewith he might bribe his keepers; and the prison discipline,
though cruel, was incredibly lax (Jack Sheppard’s two escapes from the
condemned hold, carefully described by Ainsworth, are cases in point).
To resume, our felon was now frequently visited by the Ordinary, who
zealously inquired (from the most interested motives) into his past
life, and admonished him of his approaching doom. At chapel o’ Sundays
he sat with his fellows in the condemned pew, a large dock-like
erection painted black, which stood in the centre, right in front of
and close to the ordinary’s desk and pulpit. For his last church-going
the condemned sermon was preached, the burial service was read, and
prayers were put up “especially for those awaiting the awful execution
of the law.” The reprieved also were present, and the chapel was packed
with as many spectators as could squeeze their way in.

Now, our old law was not so bad as it seemed. True, the death-penalty
was affixed to small offences; but it was comparatively rarely exacted.
In looking over Old Bailey sessions-papers of from one to two centuries
ago, I am struck with the number of acquittals--brought about, I
fancy, by the triviality of the crime, not the innocence of the
prisoner--and jurors constantly appraised the articles at twelve pence
or under to reduce the offence to petty larceny, which was not capital,
and after sentence each case was carefully considered on its merits by
the King in Council (the extraordinary care which George III. gave to
this matter is well known: he was often found pondering sentences late
into the night). Only when the offender was inveterate or his crime
atrocious was the death-penalty exacted. In effect, cases now punished
by long terms of penal servitude were then ordered for execution.
I don’t pretend to say whether or no to-day’s plan may be the more
merciful. We have, on the authority of the Newgate Ordinary, a list
between 1700 and 1711. Of forty-nine condemned in one year, thirty-six
were reprieved and thirteen executed, in another year thirty-eight
were condemned, twenty were reprieved, and eighteen were executed; the
highest annual return of executions during that period was sixty-six,
the lowest five. An Act of 1753 (25 Geo. II., c. 37) provided for the
speedy exit and dissection of murderers; but the fate of other felons
might hang dubious, as weeks often elapsed without a Privy Council
meeting. The Recorder of London brought up the report from Windsor.
When it reached Newgate, usually late at night, the condemned prisoners
were assembled in one ward. The Ordinary entered in full canonicals
and spoke his fateful message to each kneeling wretch. “I am sorry to
tell you it is all against you,” would fall on one man’s trembling
ears; while “Your case has been taken into consideration by the King
and Council and His Majesty has been mercifully pleased to spare your
life,” was the comfortable word for another. The reprieved now returned
thanks to God and the King; the others, all hope gone, must return to
the condemned hold.

There broke in on them here, during the midnight hours on the eve of
their execution, the sound of twelve strokes of a hand-bell, the while
a doleful voice in doleful rhyme addressed them:

  You prisoners that are within,
  Who for wickedness and sin....

Here the rhyme failed; but in not less dismal prose the voice
admonished them that on the morrow “the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre
will toll for you in the form and manner of a passing bell”; wherefore
it behoved them to repent. In later years the songster procured himself
this rigmarole:--

  Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
  Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near
  When you before th’ Almighty must appear.
    Examine well yourselves; in time repent,
    That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent.
  And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
  The Lord have mercy on your souls!
                      Past twelve o’clock.

Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St.
Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the
early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe,
“citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his
estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six
shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to
approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve,
and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were
likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any
stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall
(executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or
rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his _Memoirs_. The rhymes
were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune
of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall
and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind
with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious.
Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered
curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of
old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton
croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul.
“D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and
I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note
as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus
again refreshed.

But _Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum_ (a tag you may be sure the
Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and
our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his
irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter,
who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope
thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not
free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle
drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and
the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to
the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward.
Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall
of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist
of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:--“All good
people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going
to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor
passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately
considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before
his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own
charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office
to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath
an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the
cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular,
a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of
two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps
of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If
nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy
Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.”
And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses
the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the
“Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through
Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and
then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the
High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the
word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those
elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple
piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey
without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge
bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might
drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for
us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that
chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster,
some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring
how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of
Elizabethan wit, “that drinking of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to
Tyburn, said:--‘That were good drink if a man might tarry by it.’” The
Lazar went, but the St. Giles’s bowl lingered, only no longer a shaven
monk, but the landlord of the Bowl or the Crown, or what not, handed up
the liquor.

Bowl Yard, which vanished into Endell Street, long preserved the memory
of this “last refreshing.” At York a like custom prevailed, whereof
local tradition recorded a quaint apologue. The saddler of Bawtry
needs must hang--why and wherefore no man knoweth. To the amazement
and horror of all he most churlishly refused the proffered bowl. Pity
was but wasted (so our forefathers thought) on such a fellow. Before
a dry-eyed crowd he was strung up with the utmost dispatch, but a
reprieve arriving, was cut down just as quickly. All too late, however!
He was done with this world. Had he but reasonably tarried, as others
did, for his draught, he had died in his bed like many a better man.
Hence the rustic moralist taught how the saddler of Bawtry was hanged
for leaving of his ale. The compilers of the Sunday school treatises
have scandalously neglected this leading case of lost opportunities.
Nay, though a pearl “richer than all his tribe,” you shall search the
works of Dr. Smiles for it in vain.

But the day wears on, and our procession must farther westward along
Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street). It is soon quit of houses; yet the
crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and
gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the
beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words
to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the
crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways.
If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying
speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or
even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. Or “some of the Sheriff’s
officers discovering impatience to have the execution dispatched” (thus
Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of a case in 1684), Jack cuts things short
by whipping up his horses and leaves his victim dangling and agape.
More decorously the cap is drawn over his face, and he himself gives
the signal to turn off. The Hangman, if in genial mood, now stretches
the felon’s legs for him, or thumps his breast with the benevolent
design of expelling the last breath; but the brute is usually too lazy
or too careless, and these pious offices are performed by friends.

The accessories of such a last scene are preserved in Hogarth’s
_Apprentice_ Series. One of the crowd is picking a pocket, and you
foresee him ending here some day soon. (Is it not told of one rascal,
that he urged on the attendants his right to a near view, since, sure
of hanging some day, he naturally wished to see how it was done?)
Another in the crowd is bawling, a trifle prematurely, the last
speech and dying confession of Thomas Idle. Verses commemorative of
the occasion were sold broadcast. “Tyburn’s elegiac lines,” as you
may suppose, were sad doggerel. Here is the concluding portion of a
specimen (_temp. circa_ 1720):

  Fifteen of us you soon will see
  Ending our days with misery
      At the Tree, at the Tree.

Even at Tyburn, how hard to renounce all hope! There was ever the
chance of a reprieve. There is at least one well-authenticated case of
a man making a sudden bolt from the cart, and almost escaping; and,
as the _modus_ was simple strangulation, and the Hangman careless or
corrupt, it was just possible that heroic remedies might restore to
animation. On December 12, 1705, John Smith was turned off, and hung
for a quarter of an hour. A reprieve arriving, he was cut down, and
coaxed back to life. More remarkable was the case of William Duell, in
1740. To all appearance thoroughly well hanged, he was carried off for
dissection to Surgeons’ Hall, where he presently recovered himself.
He was, somewhat cruelly, restored to Newgate, but was let off with
transportation. The law was not always so merciful. In another case,
the sheriff’s officers, having heard that their prey was again alive
and kicking, hunted the wretch out, haled him back to Tyburn, and
hanged him beyond the possibility of doubt. The rumour of such marvels
inspired many attempts at resuscitation. I fancy about one per cent.
were successful, but how to tell, since the instance just quoted shows
that such triumphs were better concealed?

Now, the _corpus_ is essential to the _experimentum_, so half an hour
after the turning off, the friends bring up a deal coffin, borne
across an unhinged coach door or any such make-shift bier. But Ketch
is still in possession: the clothes are Hangman’s perquisites, and
must be purchased. How the greedy rascal appreciates the value of each
button, dwells on the splendour of each sorry ornament, watching the
while and gauging the impatience of the buyers! Never went second-hand
duds at such a figure! Sometimes he overreaches himself, or no one
comes forward to bid. Then the corpse is rudely stripped, “and the
Miscellany of Rags are all crushed into a sack which the Valet de
Chambre carries on purpose, and being digested into Monmouth Street,
Chick Lane, &c., are comfortably worn by many an industrious fellow.”
And sometimes the law claims the body to be removed and hung in chains.

In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied
to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and
dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or
London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar
in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central
gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the
authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for
political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He
would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the
Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with
bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign
against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was
burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record
where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking
proved abortive and----! The sledge so often supplanted the less
ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a
political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband
by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of
treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly.

Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now
claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said
“Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to
the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world
into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to
an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier
sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a
keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying
machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange
duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects
so many curious facts in his _Chronicles of Newgate_, alleges him not
seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the
table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison,
the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending
each execution (the _deid clack_, so they called such festivity in
Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted
that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save
brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a
prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory,
unrecorded even by _The Dictionary of National Biography_. One (as fly
in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves.

  E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,

sneers Pope, referring to an alleged habit of merely giving initials.
I have turned over a fair number of the Reverend James Guthrie’s
accounts of criminals. In those he always writes the name in full. The
witty though himself forgotten Tom Brown scribbles the epitaph of the
Reverend Samuel Smith, another Ordinary:--

                  Whither he’s gone
            Is not certainly known,
            But a man may conclude,
            Without being rude,
            That orthodox Sam
            His flock would not shame.
  And to show himself to ’em a pastor most civil,
  As he led, so he followed ’em on to the d----l.

And there were the Reverend Thomas Purney, and the Reverend John
Villette, but these be well-nigh empty names. We know most about the
Reverend Paul Lorrain, who was appointed in 1698, and died in 1719,
leaving the respectable fortune of £5000. A typical Ordinary of the
baser sort this; a greedy, gross, sensual wretch, who thrived and grew
fat on the perquisites of his office. Among these was a broadsheet,
published at eight o’clock the morning after a hanging. It was headed,
“The Ordinary of Newgate, his Account of the Behaviour, Confessions,
and Last Speeches of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn,
the--.” It gave the names and sentences of the convicts, copious
notes of the sermons (of the most wooden type) he preached at them,
biographies, and confessions, and finally the scenes at the gallows.
Let the up-to-date journalist cherish Lorrain’s name. He was an early
specimen of the personal interviewer: he had the same keen scent for
unsavoury detail, the same total disregard for the feelings or wishes
of his victim, the same readiness to betray confidence; and he had
his subject at such an advantage! You imagine the sanctimonious air
wherewith he produced his notebook and invited the wretch’s statement.
With the scene at Tyburn variety in detail was impossible. “Afterwards
the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off,” is his formula. You had
a good twopenn’orth, such was his usual modest charge! The first page
top was embellished with two cuts: on the left Old Newgate Archway, on
the right Tyburn Tree. (Gurney affected a quainter design, wherein he
stood, in full canonicals in the centre pointing the way to Heaven,
whilst on his left the Fiend, furnished with a trident, squirmed in a
bed of flames.) The broadsheet was authenticated by his signature.

Now, two things made the Reverend Paul exceeding wroth. One was the
issue of pirated confessions, which were “a great Cheat and Imposture
upon the World,” and they would not merely forge his name but mis-spell
it to boot! His is “the only true _Account_ of the Dying Criminals,”
he urgently, and no doubt truly, asserts. All this touched his pocket,
hence his ire, which blazed no less against the unrepentant malefactor,
who--a scarce less grievous offence--touched his professional pride. He
did not mince words:--“he was a Notorious and Hard-hearted Criminal,”
or afflicted with brutish ignorance or of an obstinate and hardened
disposition. “There is,” he would pointedly remark, “_a Lake of
Brimstone, a Worm that dies not, and a Fire which shall never be
quenched_. And this I must plainly tell you, that will be your dismal
portion there for ever, unless you truly Repent here in time.” And
after “Behaviour” in the title of his broadsheets, he would insert, in
parentheses, “or rather Misbehaviour.” Most of his flock, stupid with
terror, passively acquiesced in everything he said. These “Lorrain
saints,” as Steele called them, received ready absolution at his hands
and their reported end was most edifying. But in James Sheppard (the
Jacobite), who suffered March 17, 1718, for treason, Lorrain had a
most vexatious subject. A non-juring divine, “that Priest or Jesuit,
or Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,” as the Rev. Paul describes him, attended
the convict, and the Ordinary’s services were quite despised. The
intruder, “e’en at the _Gallows_, had the Presumption to give him
Publick Absolution, tho’ he visibly dy’d without Repentance.” Dr.
Doran assures us that, on the way to Tyburn, Paul and his supplanter
came to fisticuffs, and our Ordinary was unceremoniously kicked from
the cart. One would like to believe this entertaining legend, for “the
great historiographer,” as Pope and Bolingbroke sarcastically dub him,
grows less in your favour the more you scan his sheets. His account
of Sheppard concludes with the most fulsome professions of loyalty
to the King and the Protestant Succession, for which he is ready to
sacrifice his life. You note that he was charged with administering
the sacrament for temporal ends, some scandal apparently of shamful
traffic in the elements. There is no proof--indeed, we have nothing to
go on but his own denial; but it shows the gossip whereof he was the
centre. He had ingenious methods of spreading his sale. Thus he tells
his readers that a fuller account of a special case will be published
along with that of prisoners that go for execution to-morrow. In the
case of Nathaniel Parkhurst, hanged May 20, 1715, for the murder of
Count Lewis Pleuro, he actually reports the convict on the eve of his
execution cracking up in advance the report which his ghostly comforter
will presently publish! Strange advertisements fill up the odd corners
of his broadsheets. Here he puffs a manual of devotion by himself;
there the virtue of a quack medicine, some sovran remedy for colic,
gout, toothache, “The Itch or any Itching Humour.” Again, you have “The
works of Petronius Arbiter, with Cuts and a Key,” or “Apuleius’s Golden
Ass,” or some lewd publication of the day. Even if the advertisements
were Paul’s publishers’, how strange the man and the time that suffered
so incongruous a mixture! Our Ordinary petitioned parliament that his
precious broadsheets might go free of the paper tax, by reason of their
edifying nature!

Turn we now to the Hangman. No rare figure _his_ in Old England! Only
in later years was he individualised. In James I.’s time a certain
Derrick filled the office. The playwrights keep his memory green, and
the crane so called is said to take its name from him. Then there
came Gregory Brandon, who had “a fair coat of arms,” and the title of
esquire in virtue of his office. This was through a mad practical joke
of York Herald, who, perceiving a solemn ass in Garter King-at-Arms,
sent him in the papers somewhat ambiguously worded, and got the grant
in due form. York and Garter were presently laid by the heels in the
Marshalsea, “one for foolery, the other for knavery.”

Gregory was succeeded by his son, also called Gregory, though his real
name was Richard. His infantile amusement was the heading of cats and
dogs, his baby fingers seemed ever adjusting imaginary halters on
invisible necks; he was “the destined heir, From his soft cradle, to
his father’s chair”--or rather cart and ladder. The younger Brandon
was, it seems quite certain, the executioner of Charles I. Then
followed Edward, commonly known as Esquire Dun, and then the renowned
Jack Ketch, who went to his ghastly work with so callous a disregard
for human suffering, or, as some fancied, with such monstrous glee,
that his name, becoming the very synonym for hangman, clave to all his
successors. He “flourished” 1663-1686. Dryden calls him an “excellent
physician,” and commemorates him more than once in his full-resounding
line. Some held Catch his true patronymic and Ketch a corruption of
Jacquet, the family name of those who held the Manor of Tyburn during
a great part of the seventeenth century, but this, however ingenious,
seems too far-fetched. The original Jack was ungracious and surly
even beyond the manner of his kind. In January 1686, for insolence
to the sheriffs, “he was deposed and committed to Bridewell.” Pascha
Rose, a butcher, succeeded but getting himself hanged in May Ketch was
reinstated. It is recorded that he struck for higher pay--and got it
too. You might fancy that any one could adjust the “Tyburn Tippet,”
or “the riding knot an inch below the ear.” But the business called
for its own special knack. In the _History of the Press-yard_ the
Hangman is represented, after the suppression of the 1715 Rising, as
cheerfully expectant, “provided the king does not unseasonably spoil
my market by reprieves and pardons.” He will receive ample douceurs
“for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their
left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.”
Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was
never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the
traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird
worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these
rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested
for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It
was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it
too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon
No-Popery Riots (_temp._ 1780, but of course you remember your _Barnaby
Rudge_). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his
old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old
time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch
every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he
was then dismissed with this formula:--“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have
noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate--his wages were paid
over the gate--and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave
a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering
mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch.

In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew
its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes.
I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot
have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas
Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant
in that primitive time little more than a political difference with
the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He
proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change
its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his
head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king”
on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after
abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry
VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share.
On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King
caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse,
in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation,
after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the
Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued
the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked
that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet
he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he
suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last,
while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of
his disciples stood round. They fought for relics which the authorities
were determined they should not have, so that a young man having dipped
his handkerchief in the blood was forthwith arrested. In the confusion
some one cut off a finger and conveyed it away. Some one else offered
twenty pounds for a finger-joint, but the hangman dared not let it go.
The fevered imagination of Campion’s adorers saw wondrous signs. Some
pause in the flow of the Thames was noted on that day, and was ascribed
thereto. The river

                Awhile astonished stood
  To count the drops of Campion’s sacred blood.

Campion himself had long a presentiment of his fate, which, considering
the desperate nature of his mission, was not wonderful; and when
occasion took him past the Triple Tree he was moved to uncover his
head. Southwell, the “sweet singer” of the Catholic reaction, told the
end of his friend in a little work printed at Douay, but in English,
and of course for English circulation; and in 1595 Southwell followed
his brother priest. His followers noted that, when his heart was torn
out, “it leaped from the dissector’s hand and, by its thrilling, seemed
to repel the flames.” A strange legend--not quite baseless, Mr. Gardner
thinks--shows the effect of such scenes on the Catholic mind. Henrietta
Maria, Charles I.’s queen, walked barefoot to Tyburn, as to a shrine,
at dead of night, and did penance under the gallows for the sins of her
adopted country. A felon of a very different order was Mrs. Turner, who
suffered (November 14, 1615) for complicity in Sir Thomas Overbury’s
murder. She had invented yellow starch, and my Lord Coke with a fine
sense of the picturesque ordained her to hang “in her yellow Tinny
Ruff and Cuff.” She dressed the part gallantly; “her face was highly
rouged, and she wore a cobweb lawn ruff, yellow starched.” The Hangman
had also yellow bands and cuffs, he tied her hands with a black silk
ribbon herself had provided, as well as a black veil for her face.
Being turned off, she seemed to die quietly. But yellow starch went
hopelessly out of fashion!

After the Restoration, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw
were dug up at Westminster, removed at night to the Red Lion Inn,
Holborn, drawn next morning (January 30, 1661), the anniversary of
Charles’s death, to Tyburn, and there hanged in their shrouds on the
three wooden posts of the gallows. At nightfall they were taken down
and beheaded; the bodies being there buried, whilst the heads adorned
Westminster Hall. Noll had his picturesque historians before Carlyle.
A wild tale arose that his original funeral at the Abbey had been but
a mock ceremonial; for his body, according to his own instructions,
had been secretly removed to Naseby, and buried at nightfall on the
scene of that victory. Even if we disregard this legend, the subsequent
adventures of Cromwell’s head have been a matter of as much concern to
antiquaries as ever the Royal Martyr’s was to Mr. Dick.

Time would fail to narrate the picturesque and even jovial exits of
those “curled darlings” of the _Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors’ Bloody
Register_ (or any other form of the _Newgate Chronicle_), those idols
of the popular imagination, the Caroline and Georgian highwaymen. Swift
pictures the very ideal in _Clever Tom Clinch_, who--

                  ... while the rabble was bawling,
  Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling;
  He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack,
  And promised to pay for it--when he came back.
  His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white.
  His cap had a new cherry-ribbon to tie’t;
  And the maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
  And cried “Lack-a-day! he’s a proper young man!”

But how to summarise the infinite variety of detail? To tell how, when
Claude Duval swung (January 21, 1670) Ladies of Quality looked on in
tears and masks; how he lay in more than royal state in Tangier Tavern,
St. Giles’s; and how they carved on his stone “in the centre aisle of
Covent Garden Church,” the pattern of a highwayman’s epitaph:

  Here lies Du Vall: reader, if male thou art,
  Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.

How the mob bolted with Jack Sheppard’s body (November 16, 1724) to
save the “bonny corp” from the surgeon’s knife! How Jonathan Wild,
“the Great” (May 24, 1725), during the finishing touches picked the
Ordinary’s pocket of his corkscrew, and was turned off with it still
in his hand (thus Fielding: Purney was the ordinary. _His_ account
is quite different), to the unspeakable delight of that enormous body
of spectators, to which Sheppard’s two hundred thousand onlookers
were (Defoe assures us) no more to be compared than is a regiment to
an army. How Sixteen-string Jack (November 30, 1774), his “bright
pea-green coat” and “immense nosegay” were almost _too_ magnificent
even for so noble an occasion. Alas! not ours to dwell on such details;
let the brave rogues go!

I cull one instance from the peerage. Earl Ferrers suffered at Tyburn
(May 5, 1760) for the death of Johnson, his land steward. He dressed
in his wedding clothes, “a suit of white and silver”: “as good an
occasion,” he observed, “for putting them on, as that for which they
were first made” (his treatment of his wife had indirectly brought
about the murder). Every consideration was paid to my Lord’s feelings:
“A landau with six horses” was _his_ Tyburn cart, and a silk rope _his_
“anodyne necklace”; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was
so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than
hanging, he protested to the sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five
guineas was handed by mistake to the Hangman’s man, and an unseemly
altercation ensued. My Lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I
right?” were his last words. The accurate fall of the drop must have
satisfied him that he was.

I must not neglect the clergy. Here the leading case is obviously
that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (June 27, 1777). The strange ups
and down of his life (“he descended so low as to become the editor
of a newspaper”) are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his
last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol,
thought him deserving of pity “because hanged for the least crime
he had committed.” Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save him;
also wrote his address to the judge (sentence had been respited) in
reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in
Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a
reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems
to argue not a first, only a first discovered, offence. His doggerel
_Thoughts in Prison_ is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach.
His “considerable time in praying,” and “several showers of rain,”
rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen.
One was very much affected; “the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as
he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and
did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most
approved pattern) of Dodd’s unhappy end. The pair had spent much time
together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette’s behaviour
is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a
correspondent of George Selwyn himself an enthusiastic amateur of
executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief
_à la Tyburn_, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like
craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when
that divine was hanged (April 19, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay.
When Hackman let fall the handkerchief for signal it fell _outside_
the cart, and Ketch with an eye to small perquisites jumped down to
secure it _before_ he whipped up the horse. These are all names more
or less known. There are hundreds of curious incidents connected with
obscure deaths. Here are a few samples:--In 1598 “some mad knaves took
tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn.” In 1677, a
woman and “a little dog ten inches high” were hanged side by side as
accomplices--“a hideous prospect,” comments our chronicler. In 1684
Francis Kirk, having murdered his wife, must end at Tyburn. Shortly
before he had seen a fellow hanged there for making away with _his_
spouse; and this, he confessed, had inspired him!

One John Austin had the distinction of being the last person executed
at Tyburn (November 7, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the
procession as a public scandal. The sheriffs had some doubts as to
their powers; but the judges, being consulted, assured them they could
end it an they would. A month after (December 9, 1783) the gallows was
at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting
spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:--“Executions are
intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose
their reason. The old method was more satisfactory to all parties. The
public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by
it. Why is all this to be swept away?” In truth, the change of scene
was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone--save
for an occasional touch, as after Holling’s execution, when the dead
hand was thrust into a woman’s bosom, to remove a mark or wen--the
disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than
in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who knowing their
London well described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before
Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution
throughout the land. I do not criticise any system: I do but point
out that of the two sets of opposing forces noted as working on the
criminal’s mind, the latter, in a private execution, is entirely
suppressed.

Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its Hangmen, its Ordinaries,
filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention
in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has “The shape of Love’s
Tyburn”; and Dryden’s “Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart” is a
stock quotation. But I cannot string a chaplet of these pearls. Yet two
phrases I must explain. A felon who “prayed his clergy” was during some
centuries branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, ere he
was released, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in
popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598)
for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again a statute
of 1698 (10 Will. III. c. 12), provided for those who prosecuted a
felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial
duties. This was known as a “Tyburn ticket.” It had a certain money
value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was
abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 27), but it was allowed as late
as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his
ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an
Old Bailey jury.




Pillory and Cart’s-Tail

    Hood and Lamb on the Pillory--Its Various Shapes--Butcher and
    Baker--Brawler and Scold--Fraudulent Attorneys--End of the Pillory
    and of Public Whipping--Literary Martyrs--De Foe--Prynne, Bastwick,
    and Burton--Case of Titus Oates--The Tale of a Cart--Some Lesser
    Sufferers.


Hood has comically told of his pretended experiences in the
Pillory:--“It is a sort of Egg-Premiership: a place above your
fellows, but a place which you have on trial. You are not without the
established political vice, for you are not exempt from turning,”--with
more punning cogitations of a like nature. Of rarer humour is Charles
Lamb’s _Reflections in the Pillory_, with its invocation to them that
once stood therein:--“Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over
thee--Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare--from their
(little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions.
Ketch, turn me!” A century or so earlier these ingenious wits had
possibly stood therein--in fact and not in fancy. It was a way our
old-time rulers had of rewarding ingenious wits. And not wits alone:
since for many centuries it was in daily use throughout the length and
breadth of Merrie England.

Our treatment of crime is the exact opposite of our forefathers’. Our
criminal toils, is flogged, is hanged in private; the old idea was
to make punishment as public as possible, for so penalty and effect
(it was thought) were heightened and increased. The Pillory was the
completest expression of this idea. A man was exposed for sixty minutes
in the market-place at the busiest hour of the day, and the public
itself was summoned to approve of and aid the punishment. The thing
was known in old Saxon days. In the laws of Withred it is called
_healsfang_. The mediæval Latin name for it was _collistrigium_. Both
terms = a “catch for the neck.” Its form varied. The simplest was a
wooden frame or screen, with three holes in it, elevated some feet
above the ground. The culprit stood behind upon a platform, his
head and hands caught in and stuck through the aforesaid holes. This
was much like the stocks, save that there the patient sat instead of
stood and had his feet enclosed instead of his head and hands. In
popular phrase this was “to peep through the nut-crackers.” Again,
the structure swung on a pivot; so that the inmate might face the
compass points in turn. Sometimes, though this was rather a foreign
fashion, it was so commodious that it would take a nosegay of twelve;
at the same time that it went revolving and revolving--a very far from
merry-go-round! Now (as at Dublin) it was the kernel of a large and
imposing structure of stone. Now (as at Coleshill, in Warwickshire)
it stood a deft arrangements of uprights, boards, and holes, and did
triple duty--as stocks, as whipping-post, as Pillory. Now, yet again
(as at Marlborough, in Wiltshire), the frame turned on a swivel at the
will of the patient, whose deft twistings in dodging missiles hugely
delighted the grinning mob. With pen and pencil Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt
and other antiquarians have preserved for our delectation yet other
forms.

The Pillory was first used for dishonest bakers, brewers, corn-sellers,
and the like. Then, its offices were extended to divers kinds of
misdemeanants. Later, it was the lot of your scurrile pamphleteer, your
libeller, and your publisher of unlicensed volumes. The victim was not
always pelted; for feeling might run high against the Government; and
when he was acclaimed his shame became his glory. So the thing served
as a weather-glass of popular opinion.

I turn to some historic instances. Under Henry III., by the Assize
of Bread and Ale, it was decreed that knavish bakers, brewers, and
butchers be “set on the pyllory.” It was also provided that “The
pyllory shal be of a metely strengthe, so that they that be fautye
may be thereon without any jeopardye of their lyvys.” (The platform
must not seldom have broken down, leaving the “worm of the hour”
suspended by the neck--that had been securely fastened--in peril of
strangulation, in a case of this sort, under Elizabeth, he sued the
town, and recovered damages.) The articles of usage for the City of
London, published under Edward I., set forth some evil humours of the
time. Rustical simplicity fell, then as now, an easy prey to urban
cunning. What rascals these mediæval cits were, to be sure! Thus, your
corn dealer would take in grain from harmless necessary bumpkins, to
whom he would give an earnest, telling them to come to his house for
payment. Here he met them with a long face:--his wife had gone out with
the key of the cash-box; would his country friends call again? And when
they do, he is “not in.” (Ah! That “call again” and that “not in!” Were
they stale so many centuries ago?) If the rogue were discovered, he
impudently denied his debt:--he had never seen the gentlemen before;
or, raising some dispute about the price, he told him to take back his
goods--when the corn was found too wet for removal. “By these means
the poor men lose half their pay in expenses before they are settled
with;” and the wrong-doer is to be amerced heavily. Being unable to
pay, “then he shall be put on the Pillory, and remain there an hour in
the day at least; a Serjeant of the City standing by the side of the
Pillory with good hue-and-cry as to the reason why he is punished.”
The wicked butcher suffered after the same fashion; while the baker,
who put off bad bread, was drawn--for the first offence upon a hurdle
from the Guildhall to his own house, by “the great streets that are
most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging about his neck,” a spectacle
to gods and a cockshy for men. For the second offence he processioned
as before; and, to boot, he must stand in the Pillory for an hour.
Offending for the third time, he was judged incorrigible: his oven was
dismantled, and he might bake within the city bounds no more. Sure, the
ancient London loaf, be it _manchet_, or _chete_, or mere _mystelon_,
must ever have been of good quality? When, indeed, did the falling off
begin? Was it when the city fathers unwisely took to regulating men’s
morals? In the seventh of Richard II. this punishment was ordained
for the man of evil life:--“Let his head and beard be shaved except a
fringe on the head two inches in breadth, and let him be taken to the
Pillory, with minstrels, and set thereon for a certain time, at the
discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.” As for the erring sister, she
was taken from the prison into Aldgate with a hood of ray and a white
wand in her hand. From Aldgate minstrels played her to the Thew (a
species of Pillory for women). Thence, her offence being proclaimed,
she was led “through Chepe and Newgate to Cokkes Lane, there to take
up her abode.” Again, the brawler or the scold must hold a distaff
with tow in hand--and so on; for your old-time law-giver lusted after
variation.

Once the Pillory was an indispensable ornament of the market-place.
Nay, were it not kept fit for use, the very right to hold a market
might be lost. As an emblem of power, it was claimed by the great
lords: often, indeed, it went with the lordship of the manor. Thus at
Beverley, in the twenty-first of Edward I., John, Archbishop of York,
claims the right of Pillory with the right of gallows and gibbet;
and with the right of Pillory the right of tumbrell, which was the
dung-cart wherein minor malefactors were shamefully trundled through
the town. Legislative ingenuity was ever striving to devise fresh marks
of ignominy. Stow relates that, in the seventh of Edward IV., certain
common jurors must (for their partial conduct) ride in paper mitres
from Newgate to the Pillory in Cornhill, and there do penance for their
fault. Again, in the first of Henry VIII. (1509), Smith and Simpson,
ringleaders of false inquests, rode the City (also in paper mitres)
with their faces to the horse’s tail; and they were set on the Pillory
in Cornhill; and they were brought again to Newgate, where they died
from very shame. The like fate, it seems, befell a much later offender,
one James Morris, who was pilloried (April 2, 1803) for fraud in the
market place at Lancaster. Next morning he was found dead in his bed,
and the coroner’s jury brought it in as “visitation of God.” Oft-times
the sufferer came less mysteriously to his end. The mobility was,
in effect, invited, as it were, to italicise his sentence in terms
of anything you please, from rotten eggs to brickbats. Not seldom it
did so to the sternest purpose. On June 22, 1732, contemporary prints
report:--“Last night the corpse of John Walker, who was killed in the
Pillory on Tuesday last, was buried at St. Andrew’s, Holborn;” and
among the casualties of the December of that same year, the case of
another poor wretch is dismissed with “murder’d in the pillory.” In
1756 Egon and two others were pilloried for procuring the commission of
a robbery, in order to get a reward for its detection. Egon was stoned
to death. On one or two occasions--notably when Elizabeth Collier was
pilloried by order of Jeffreys in 1680--the authorities were ordered to
see that the peace was kept and that the culprit suffered the exposure
alone.

A long list might be given of misdemeanours punished by the
Pillory:--as, practising the art magick; cutting a purse; placing a
piece of iron in a loaf of bread; selling bad oats, stinking eels,
strawberry pottles half fall of fern; vending ale by measures not
sealed and thickening the bottom of such measures with pewter. As
(also) lies, defamations, and libels of all sorts. If the lie were
notorious, or were told of the mayor or any other dignitary, the liar
was pilloried with a whetstone round his neck: whence it came that a
whetstone was the popular reward for audacious mendacity, and “lying
for the whetstone” was a current phrase.

Late Tudor and Stuart times edged and weighted the punishment of
the Pillory. It might be preceded by a flogging at the Cart’s-tail.
Stripped to the waist, the culprit, man or woman, was tied to the
hinder end (our fathers used a shorter phrase) of a cart, and was thus
lashed through the streets. (This vulgarly was called, “Shoving the
tumbler,” or “Crying carrots and turnips.”) Or, as Butler’s couplet
reminds us, the patient’s ears were nailed to the wood:--

  Each window like a Pillory appears,
  With heads thrust through, nail’d by the ears.

Or his ears were cropped, and not seldom his nose was slit likewise.
In 1570, Timothy Penredd was pilloried in Chepe on two successive
market-days for counterfeiting the seal of the Queen’s Bench. Each
time an ear was nailed; and this poor member he must free “by his own
proper motion.” If the wrench were too great for human fortitude, the
thoughtful authorities lent some aid. In one case (1552) the culprit
would not “rent his eare”; so that in the long run “one of the bedles
slitted yt upwards with a penkniffe to loose it.” Indeed, the law had
a strong grudge against the ears of malefactors. The fourteenth of
Elizabeth, cap. 5, ordered that vagrants be grievously whipped and
burned through the gristle of the right ear, unless some credible
person took them to service (if they relapsed they were hanged). The
punishments of the time show a curious alternation between Pillory
and Cart. Thus, whilst keepers of immoral houses were carted about
the town to the music of ringing basins, in the eleventh of James I.,
William Barnwell, “gentleman” (an inaccurate description had vitiated
the indictment), and his wife Thomasina, criminals of the same class,
were whipped at the Cart’s-tail from the prison to their house, and
back again. Thus, too, were handled those who lived by cards and dice;
but, for witchcraft, Dorothy Magicke was set four times a year upon
the Pillory, and must thereon make public confession. This man capers
dolefully at the Cart’s-tail for stealing lead; that must take his
turn in the Pillory for snatching three-pence worth of hairs from a
mare’s tail. Later, it was thought excellent for fraudulent attorneys.
In November 1786 one “Mr. A----” (the name is thus disguised), a legal
gentleman, was brought from Newgate in a hackney cab and pilloried for
an hour hard by the gate of Westminster Hall. What he did, and how he
fared, we are not told; so it may be that his hap was even as Thomas
Scott’s, pilloried for a false accusation in January 1804. Scott was
pelted with rotten eggs, filth, and dirt of the street. Also, the
neighbouring ragamuffins had thoughtfully collected good store of dead
cats and rats “in the vicinity of the metropolis” that morning.

Was it so very edifying after all? Opinions began to differ. Yet Lord
Thurlow solemnly cracked it up “as a restraint against licentiousness
provided by the wisdom of our ancestors”; and in 1814 Lord Ellenborough
ordered Lord Cochrane to be pilloried for conspiring to spread false
news. The justice of this last abominable sentence was questioned.
Sir Francis Burdett, Cochrane’s fellow-member for Middlesex, vowed
that he would stand with him on the day of punishment; but the
Government did not venture to carry out the sentence. Two years later,
in 1816, the punishment of Pillory was restricted to persons guilty
of perjury; and in 1837, by the 1 Vict. cap. 23, it was abolished
altogether. The last person who suffered it is said to have been
Peter James Bossy, pilloried in front of the Old Bailey, June 24,
1830. The public whipping of women went in 1817; the private followed
in 1820 by 1 Geo. IV. cap. 57. The whipping of men for a common law
misdemeanour has never been formally abolished; but the punishment is
now inflicted only under the Garrotters Act (1863) for robbery with
violence; which, of course, has nothing to do with existing statutory
provisions for the flogging of juvenile male offenders. I should add
that in America Pillory and Whipping-Post were “an unconscionable time
a-dying”; lingered especially in the State of Delaware; and that their
restoration has been urged.

The Finger Pillory deserves a word. It was fixed up inside churches
(that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, for instance) and halls. Boys who
misbehaved during service, and offenders at festive times against
the mock reign of the lord of misrule, alike expiated their offences
therein.

I note some remarkable cases. First, and most important, is the group
of literary martyrs. The Stuart Government could not crush the press;
but author, printer, and publisher all worked in peril of the Pillory.
The author of _Robinson Crusoe_ was, perhaps, its most famous inmate.

  Earless on high stood unabash’d De Foe,
  And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below,

sings Pope in the _Dunciad_ with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe,
for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, was condemned to stand
thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in
Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very
well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls
a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (_Hymn
to the Pillory_). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned
Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but
then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John
Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped
death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys,
on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment,
during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town
in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that
this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained.
Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King
to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither
whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled;
and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the
Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined
Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So
after he had treated Mr. _Tutchin_ with a glass of wine, Mr. _Tutchin_
went away.”

Another of Pope’s examples is “old Prynne,” cropped (in 1632) in the
Pillory for his _Histriomastic_, or Players’ Scourge, which was held to
reflect on Charles I.’s Queen. Again he stood there in 1637, when the
executioner cruelly mangled the ancient stumps. A quite incorrigible
person was this same William Prynne, described by Marchmont Needham
as “one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept about a library.”
He wrote some forty works remarkable for virulence even in that age
of bitter polemics. He strenuously supported the Restoration, and the
new Government was at its wit’s end what to do with him till Charles
himself solved the difficulty with happy humour. “Let him amuse himself
with writing against the Catholics and poring over the records in the
Tower,” said the king; and silenced him with the Keepership of the
Records and £500 a year. Prynne’s second appearance was for a bitter
attack on Laud; and he had as fellow-sufferers John Bastwick, who had
written a sort of mock _Litanie_, and Henry Burton. Bastwick was “very
merrie.” His wife “got on a stool and kissed him;” and, “his ears being
cut off, she called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and
carried them away with her.” There was a great crowd, which “cried and
howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropped.” Being angered by
the jeers and execrations of the mob, the executioner did his work very
brutally. Pope’s Billingsgate is classic, but it remains Billingsgate.
The Pillory shows often in his verse. Edmund Curl was a pet aversion
of his, and for publishing the _Memoirs of Ker of Kersland_ Curl
suffered the punishment at Charing Cross on Feb. 23, 1728. Pope hints
(_Dunciad_, II. 3 and 4) that he was badly handled by the mob. In truth
he came off very well, owing, it seems, to an explanatory circular he
got distributed among the spectators.

As time wore on the punishment reverted to its earlier and milder form.
Thus, in 1630, Dr. Leighton, for his _Zion’s Plea against Prelacy_,
was pilloried, branded, cropped, and whipped; but the authors of the
eighteenth century were punished by exposure alone, and were often
solaced by popular sympathy. In 1765 Williams, the bookseller, stood
in the Pillory for re-publishing _The North Briton_: he held a sprig
of laurel in his hand, and a large collection was made for him then
and there. In derision of authority the mob displayed (_inter alia_)
the famous Bootjack--the popular reference to Lord Bute, the late
Prime Minister. Still more farcical was the exposure (1759) of Dr.
Shebbeare for publishing political libels. He was attended on the
platform by a servant in livery holding an umbrella over his head,
and his neck and arms were not confined. The court thought the
under-sheriff of Middlesex something more than remiss: wherefore he
was fined and imprisoned, it being judicially decided that the culprit
must stand not merely _on_ but _in_ the Pillory. In this connexion I
will only further mention the case of Eton the publisher, “a very old
man,” who in 1812 was pilloried for printing Paine’s _Age of Reason_.
Here, again, the crowd, by the respect it heaped upon the prisoner,
altogether eliminated the sting from the punishment. The minor scribe
of to-day is supposed to court an action, nay, a criminal prosecution,
as a stimulus to circulation; a former age saw in the Pillory the best
possible advertisement for the Grub Street hack. In Foote’s _Patron_,
Puff, the publisher, urges Dactyl to produce a satire; and, when the
proposed risk is hinted at, retorts: “Why, I would not give twopence
for an author who was afraid of his ears.... Why, zooks, sir! I never
got salt for my porridge till I mounted at the Royal Exchange, that was
the making of me.... The true Castalian stream is a shower of eggs and
a Pillory the poet’s Parnassus.”

Among cases other than literary, a notable one is that of Titus Oates
(1685), who, being convicted of perjury, was sentenced to stand in
the Pillory and be whipped at the Cart’s-tail. The lashing was so
cruelly done that you feel some pity even for that arch rascal. The
curious computed that he received 2256 strokes with a whip of six
thongs--13,536 strokes in all. Yet the wretch lived to enjoy a pension
after the Revolution! There was another remarkable instance that same
year. Thomas Dangerfield, convicted of libelling the King when Duke of
York, was sentenced to a fine, to the Pillory, and to be whipped from
Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The dreadful work was
over, and he was returning prisonwards in a coach, when there steps
forward Robert Francis, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, with the cruel jibe,
“How now, friend? Have you had your heat this morning?” Dangerfield
turned on him with bitter curses (“Son of a wh----” is the elegant
sample preserved by the records). Francis, much enraged, thrust at the
aching, smarting, bleeding wretch with a small cane, and by mischance
put out an eye, so that in two hours Dangerfield was dead; and no great
while thereafter he himself was tried, condemned, and hanged. According
to the testimony of the Rev. Mr. Samuel Smith, Ordinary at Newgate, he
made a very edifying end.

Quite interesting is the case of Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter
Stringer, whose unhappy memory is preserved in some of Pope’s most
biting lines. In 1731, poor Japhet stood in the Pillory at Charing
Cross for forging a deed; when the hangman, dressed like a butcher,
“with a knife like a gardener’s pruning knife cut off his ears, and
with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils.” The wretch endured all
this with great patience; but at the searing “the pain was so great
that he got up from his chair.” No wonder! Two years after Eleanor
Beare, keeper of “The White Horse,” Nuns Green, Derby, was pilloried
(August 1732) after just escaping the gallows for murder. She mounted
the platform “with an easy air”; thus exasperating a mob already
ill-disposed, which bombarded her with apples, eggs, turnips, and so
forth; so that “the stagnate kennels were robbed of their contents, and
became the cleanest part of the street.” Managing to escape, she dashed
off, “a moving heap of filth,” but was presently seized and lugged
back; and at the end of the hour she was carried to prison, “an object
which none cared to touch.” A week after she was again forced to take
her stand. The officer noted that her head was wondrous swelled, and
he presently stripped it of “ten or twelve coverings,” whereof one was
a pewter plate. Her aspect was most forlorn, but the crowd, no whit
moved, pelted its hardest, and she was borne away more dead than alive.
Yet she too not only lived, but “recovered her health, her spirits,
and her beauty.” Two lighter instances, and I have done. In the early
stages of Monmouth’s rebellion, an astrologer, consulting the stars,
saw that the duke would be presently King of England. After Sedgemoor
he was cast into Dorchester Gaol for this unlucky prediction. Again
falling to his observations, he clearly read “that he would be whipped
at the Cart’s ----”; and this time the planets spoke true. In 1783, the
poet Cowper reports one humorous case from his own experience. At Olney
a man was publicly whipped for theft; he whealed with every stroke; but
that was only because the beadle drew the scourge against a piece of
red ochre hidden in his hand. Noting the fraud, the parish constable
laid his cane smartly about the shoulders of the all too-lenient
official, whereat a country wench, in high dudgeon, set to pomelling
the constable. And of the three the thief alone escaped punishment.




State Trials for Witchcraft

    Early Laws against Witchcraft--The Essex Witches--The Devon
    Witches--The Bury St. Edmunds Case--Bewitched Children--The
    Scepticism of Serjeant Keeling--Evidence of Sir Thomas Browne--The
    Judge’s Charge--The End of it All--The Trial of Richard
    Hathaway--The Comic Side of Superstition--A Rogue’s Punishment--A
    Word in Conclusion.


I propose to examine the Witchcraft cases in Howell’s twenty-one bulky
volumes of State Trials. The general subject, even in England, is too
vast for detailed treatment here; also it is choked with all manner of
absurdities. In a trial some of these are pared away: you know what
the people saw, or believed they saw, and you have the declarations of
the witches themselves. Only five cases, all between 1616 (13 Jac. I.)
and 1702 (1 Anne) are reported. The selection is capricious, for some
famous prosecutions as that of the Lancashire witches are omitted, but
it is fairly representative.

In the early times Witchcraft and sorcery were left to the Church. In
1541, 33 Hen. VIII. c. 8, made both felony without “benefit of clergy;”
and by the 1 Jac. I. c. 12, all persons invoking any evil spirit, or
taking up dead bodies from their graves to be used in any Witchcraft,
sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or killing or otherwise hurting any
person by such infernal arts, shall be guilty of felony without
“benefit of clergy,” and suffer death. King James’s views on Witchcraft
and his skill (whereon he greatly plumed himself) as witch-finder are
famed. Royal influence went hand-in-hand with popular superstition. In
less than a century and a half, legislative if not vulgar ideas were
altered, and in 1736, by 9 Geo. II. c. 5, the laws against Witchcraft
were swept away, though charlatans professing the occult sciences were
still punished as cheats.

I pass as of little interest Howell’s first case, that of Mary Smith,
in 1616. More worthy of note are the proceedings against the Essex
witches, some twenty in number, condemned at the Chelmsford Sessions on
July 29, 1645, before the Earl of Warwick and other Justices. One noted
witch was Elizabeth Clarke to whom the devil had appeared “in the shape
of a proper gentleman with a laced band, having the whole proportion of
a man.” She had certain imps, whom she called Jamara (“a white dogge
with red spots”), Vinegar Tom, Hoult, and Sack and Sugar. So far the
information of Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, gent., who further said
that the same evening whereon the accused confessed those marvels to
him, “he espied a white thing about the bignesse of a kitlyn,” which
bit a piece out of his greyhound, and in his own yard that very night
“he espied a black thing proportioned like a cat, only it was thrice
as big, sitting on a strawberry-bed, and fixing the eyes on this
informant.”

John Sterne, gent., had equal wonders of imps the size of small dogs,
and how Sack and Sugar were like to do him hurt. ’Twere well, said the
malevolent Elizabeth, “that this informant were so quick, otherwise
the said impe had soone skipped upon his face, and perchance had got
into his throate, and then there would have been a feast of toades in
this informant’s belly.” The witch Clarke ascribed her undoing to Anne
Weste, widow, here usually called Old Beldam Weste, who, coming upon
her as she was picking up a few sticks, and seeming to pity her for
“her lamenesse (having but one leg) and her poverty,” promised to send
her a little kitten to assist her. Sure enough, a few nights after
two imps appeared, who vowed to “help her to an husband who should
maintain her ever after.” A country justice’s notions of evidence are
not supposed to be exact even to-day; what they were then let the
information of Robert Tayler, also of Manningtree, show. It seems
Clarke had accused one Elizabeth Gooding as a confederate. Gooding was
refused credit at Tayler’s for half a pound of cheese, whereupon “she
went away muttering and mumbling to herself, and within a few hours
came again with money and bought a pound of cheese of this informant.”
That very night Tayler’s horse fell grievously ill and four farriers
were gravelled to tell what ailed it, but this portentous fact was
noted: “the belly of the said horse would rumble and make a noyse as
a foule chimney set on fire.” In four days it was dead. Tayler had
also heard that certain confessed witches had “impeached the said
Elizabeth Gooding for killing of this said horse,” moreover Elizabeth
kept company with notorious witches--after which scepticism was scarce
permissible. Rebecca Weste, a prisoner awaiting trial in Colchester,
confessed how at a witches’ meeting the devil appeared to her in the
shape of a dog and kissed her. In less than six months he came again
and promised to marry her. “Shee said he kissed her, but was as cold as
clay, and married her that night in this manner: he tooke her by the
hand and led her about the chamber and promised to be a loving husband
to death, and to avenge her of her enemies.”

One Rawbood had taken a house over the head of Margaret Moon, another
of the accused, with highly unpleasant consequences. Thus, Mrs.
Rawbood, though a “very tydy and cleanly woman, sitting upon a block,
after dinner with another neighbour, a little before it was time to go
to church upon an Easter Day, the said Rawbood’s wife was on a sudden
so filled with lice that they might have been swept off her clothes
with a stick; and this informant saith he did see them, and that they
were long and lean, and not like other lice.” More gruesome were the
confessions of Rebecca Jones, of Osyth. One fine day some twenty-five
years past she, a servant lass at Much-Clacton, was summoned by a knock
at the door, where she saw “a very handsome young man, as shee then
thought, but now shee thinks it was the devil.” Politely inquiring how
she did, he desired to see her left wrist, which being shown him, he
pulled out a pin “from this examinant’s owne sleeve, and pricked her
wrist twice, and there came out a drop of bloud, which he took off
with the top of his finger, and so departed”--leaving poor Rebecca’s
heart all in a flutter. About four months afterwards as she was going
to market to sell butter, a “man met with her, being in a ragged state,
and having such great eyes that this examinant was very much afraid of
him.” He presented her with three things like to “moules,” which she
afterwards used to destroy her neighbours’ cattle, and now and again
her neighbours themselves. In evidence against other suspects there was
mention of a familiar called Elimanzer, who was fed with milk pottage,
and of imps called Wynowe, Jeso, Panu, with many other remarkable
particulars.

The foregoing was collected before trial as information upon oath; but
this testimony of Sir Thomas Bowes, knight, was given from the bench
during the trial of Anne Weste, whom it concerned. He reported that
an honest man of Manningtree passing Anne Weste’s door at the very
witching hour of night, in bright moonlight saw four things like black
rabbits emerge. He caught one of them, and beat the head of it against
his stick, “intending to beat out the braines of it,” failing in which
benevolent design, he next tried to tear off its head, “and as he wrung
and stretched the neck of it, it came out between his hands like a lock
of wooll;” then he went to a spring to drown it, but at every step he
fell down, yet he managed to creep to the water, under which he held
the thing “a good space.” Thinking it was drowned he let go, whereupon
“it sprang out of the water into the aire, and so vanished away.” There
was but one end possible for people who froze the rustic soul with such
pranks. Each and all were soon dangling from the gallows.

The case of the Devon witches tried at Exeter in August 1682 is much
like the Essex business. The informations are stuffed with grotesque
horrors, yet it is hard to believe that the accused--three poor women
from Bideford, two of them widows--had been convicted but for their
own confessions, which are full of copious and minute details of their
dealings with Satan. Going to their death, they were worried by Mr.
H----, a nonconformist preacher and (as is evident) a very pestilent
fellow. “Did you pass through the keyhole of the door, or was the door
open?” was one query. The witch asserted that like other people she
entered by the door, though “the devil did lead me upstairs.” Mr. H----
went on, “How do you know it was the devil?” “I knew it by his eyes,”
she returned. Again, “Did you never ride over an arm of the sea on a
cow?”--an exploit which the poor woman sturdily disclaimed. Mr. H----,
a little dissatisfied, one fancies, prayed at them a while, after which
two of the women were turned off the ladder. Mr. Sheriff tried his
hand at the survivor: he was curious as to the shape or colour of the
devil, and was answered that he appeared “in black like a bullock.”
He again pressed her as to whether she went in “through the keyhole
or the door,” but she alleged the more commonplace and (for a witch)
unorthodox mode of entry, “and so was executed.”

Between these two cases one occurred wherein the best legal intellect
of the day was engaged--and with no better result. In March 1665, Rose
Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, were indicted at the Assizes at Bury
St. Edmunds for bewitching certain people. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief
Baron of the Exchequer, presided. “Still his name is of account.” To
an earlier time he seemed a judge “whom for his integrity, learning,
and law, hardly any age, either before or since, could parallel.”
William Durant, an infant, was one victim; his mother had promised
Amy Duny a penny to watch him, but she was strictly charged not to
give him suck. To what end? queried the court reflecting on Amy’s age.
The mother replied: firstly, Amy had the reputation of a witch, and
secondly, it was a custom of old women thus to please the child, “and
it did please the child, but it sucked nothing but wind, which did
the child hurt.” The two women had a quarrel on the subject: Amy was
enraged, and departed after some dark sayings, and the boy forthwith
fell into “strange fits of swounding.” Dr. Jacob, of Yarmouth, an
eminent witch-doctor, advised “to hang up the child’s blanket in the
chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed
to put it into the said blanket, and if she found anything in it she
should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire.” The blanket was duly
hung up, and taken down, when a great toad fell out, which being thrown
into the fire made (not unnaturally) “a great and horrible noise;”
followed a crack and a flash, and--exit the toad! The court with solemn
foolishness inquired if the substance of the toad was not seen to
consume? and was stoutly answered “No.” Next day Amy was discovered
sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. She was in
“a most lamentable condition,” having her face all scorched with fire.
This deponent had no doubt as to the witch’s guilt, “for that the said
Amy hath been long reputed to be a witch and a person of very evil
behaviour, whose kindred and relations have been many of them accused
for witchcraft, and some of them have been condemned.”

Elizabeth Pacy was another bewitched child. By direction of the judge,
Amy Duny was made to touch her, whereupon the child clawed the Old
Beldam till the blood came--a portentous fact, for everybody knew that
the bewitched would naturally scratch the tormentor’s face and thus
obtain relief. The father of the child, Samuel Pacy (whose soberness
and moderation are specially commended by the reporter), now told how
Amy Duny thrice came to buy herrings, and, being as often refused,
“went away grumbling, but what she said was not perfectly understood.”
Immediately his child Deborah fell sick, whereupon Amy was set in the
stocks. Here she confessed that, when any of her offspring were so
afflicted, “she had been fain to open her child’s mouth with a tap to
give it vitals,” which simple device the sapient Pacy practised upon
his brats with some effect, but still continuing ill they vomited
“crooked pins and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head,
which pins, amounting to forty or more, together with the twopenny
nail, were produced in court,” so what room was there for doubt? The
children, continually accusing Amy Duny and Rose Cullender as cause
of their sickness, were packed off by their distracted father to his
sister at Yarmouth, who now took up the wondrous tale. When the younger
child was taking the air out of doors, “presently a little thing like a
bee flew upon her face, and would have gone into her mouth.” She rushed
indoors, and incontinent vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head,
whose presence she accounted for thus: “the bee brought this nail and
forced it into her mouth”; from all which the guilt of the witches was
ever more evident.

Even that age had its sceptics. Some people in court, chief among them
Mr. Serjeant Keeling, whose position and learning made it impossible
to disregard their opinion, “seemed much unsatisfied.” The learned
serjeant pointed out that even if the children were bewitched, there
was no real evidence to connect the prisoners with the fact. Then Dr.
Browne, of Norwich, “a person of great knowledge” (no other, alas! than
the Sir Thomas Browne of the _Religio Medici_), made a very learned if
confusing dissertation on Witchcraft in general, with some curious
details as to a late “great discovery of witches” in Denmark; which
no whit advanced the matter. Then there was another experiment. Amy
Duny was brought to one of the children whose eyes were blinded. The
child was presently touched by another person, “which produced the
same effect as the touch of the witch did in the court.” The sceptical
Keeling and his set now roundly declared the whole business a sham,
which “put the court and all persons into a stand. But at length
Mr. Pacy did declare that possibly the maid might be deceived by a
suspicion that the witch touched her when she did not.” This was the
very point the sceptics were making, and was anything but an argument
in reply, though it seems to have been accepted as such. And how to
suppose, it was urged, that innocent children would tell such terrible
lies? It was the golden age of the rod; never was there fitter occasion
for its use. Once fancies a few strokes had produced remarkable
confessions from the innocents! However, the court went on hearing
evidence. The judge summed up with much seeming impartiality, much
wooden wisdom, and the usual judicial platitudes, all which after more
than two centuries you read with considerable irritation. The jury upon
half an hour’s deliberation returned a verdict of guilty. Next morning
the children were brought to the judge, “and Mr. Pacy did affirm that
within less than half an hour after the witches were convicted they
were all of them restored.” After this, what place was left for doubt?
“In conclusion the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with
the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches that they
should be hanged.” Three days afterwards the poor unfortunates went to
their death. “They were much urged to confess, but would not.”

Finally, you have this much less tragic business. In the first year
of Queen Anne’s reign (1702), Richard Hathaway was tried at the
Surrey Assizes before Lord Chief Justice Holt for falsely accusing
Sarah Morduck of bewitching him. The offence being a misdemeanour,
the prisoner had counsel, an advantage not then fully given to those
charged with felony. The trial reads like one in our own day. The case
for the Crown had been carefully put together. Possibly the authorities
were striking at accusations of and prosecutions for Witchcraft.
Sarah Morduck had been tried and acquitted at Guildford Assizes for
bewitching Hathaway, whereupon this prosecution had been ordered. Dr.
Martin, parish minister in Southwark, an able and enlightened divine,
had saved Sarah from the mob, and so was led on to probe the matter.
He found Hathaway apparently blind and dumb, but giving his assent
by a sign to the suggestion that he should scratch Morduck, and so
(according to the superstition already noted) obtain relief. Dr. Martin
brought Sarah and a woman of the same height called Johnson to the room
where the impostor lay, seemingly, at death’s door. Morduck announced
her willingness to be scratched, and then Johnson’s hand was put into
his. Hathaway was suspicious, and felt the arm very carefully, whereat
the parson “spoke to him somewhat eagerly: If you will not scratch I
will begone.” Whereupon he clawed so lustily that Johnson near fainted.
She was forthwith hustled out of the room and Morduck pushed forward;
but the rogue, fearing a trap, lay quiet till Dr. Martin encouraged him
by simulated admiration. Then he opened wide his eyes, “caught hold of
the apron of Sarah Morduck, and looked her in the face,” thus implying
that his supposed scratching of her had restored his eyesight. Being
informed of his blunder he “seemed much cast down,” but his native
impudence soon asserting itself, he gave himself out for worse than
ever, whilst Sarah Morduck, anxious to be clear at any cost, declared
that not she but Johnson was the witch. The popular voice roundly
abused Dr. Martin for a stubborn sceptic. Charges of bribery against
him, as well as against the judge and jury who had acquitted Morduck,
were freely bandied about. Dr. Martin had got Bateman a friend of his
to see Hathaway, one of whose symptoms was the vomiting of pins. His
evidence was that the rogue scattered the pins about the room by
sleight of hand; Bateman had taken several parcels of them, almost by
force, out of his pocket. Kensy, a surgeon, further told how Hathaway,
being committed to his care, at first would neither eat nor drink.
Kensy being afraid that he would starve himself to death sooner than
have his cheat discovered, arranged a pretended quarrel with his maid
Baker, who supplied the patient with food as if against his orders.
Indeed, she plied him so well with meat and drink that, so she told
the court, “he was very merry and danced about, and took the tongs
and played upon them, but after that he was mightily sick and vomited
sadly”--but there were no pins and needles! She further told how four
gentlemen, privily stored away in the buttery and coal-hole, witnessed
Hathaway’s gastronomic feats. Serjeant Jenner for the defence called
several witnesses, who testified to the prisoner’s abstinence from
food for quite miraculous periods. The force of this evidence was much
shaken by the pertinent cross-examination of the judge, who asked the
jury in his summing up, “Whether you have any evidence to induce you
to believe it to be in the power of all the witches in the world, or
all the Devils in Hell, to fast beyond the usual time that nature will
allow: they cannot invert the order of nature.” The jury, “without
going from the bar, brought him in Guilty.” He was sentenced to a fine,
a sound flogging, the pillory, and imprisonment with hard labour. The
last conviction for Witchcraft in England was that of Jane Wenham,
at Hertford, in 1712. She was respited by the judge and afterwards
pardoned. The case is not here reported.

These trials throw a curious light on the ideas of the time;
unfortunately they exhibit human nature in some of its worst aspects.
The victims were women, old, poor, helpless, and the persecution to
which they were subjected was due partly to superstition, partly to
that delight in cruelty so strong in the natural man. The “confessions”
of the accused are easily accounted for. The popular beliefs so
impressed their imaginations that they believed in their own malevolent
power, also the terror they inspired lacked not charm, it procured
them consideration, some money, even some protection. Not seldom
their “confessions” were merely terrified assents to statements made
about them by witch-finders, clergymen, and justices. And the judges?
Sometimes, alas! they callously administered a law in which they had no
belief. Is there not still something inexplicable? Well, such things as
mesmerism, thought-reading, and so forth exhibit remarkable phenomena.
A former age ascribed all to Satan: we believe them natural though we
cannot as yet solve all their riddles. I must add that the ancient
popular horror of witches is partly explained by the hideous and
grotesque details given at the trials, but those obscenities I dare not
reproduce.




A Pair of Parricides

    The State Trials--The Dry Bones of Romance--Pictures of
    the Past--Their Value for the Present--The Case of Philip
    Standsfield--The Place of the Tragedy--The Night of the
    Murder--The Scene in Morham Kirk--The Trial--“The Bluidy
    Advocate--Mackenzie”--The Fate of Standsfield--The Case
    of Mary Blandy, Spinster--The Villain of the Piece--The
    Maid’s Gossip--Death of Mr. Blandy--The “Angel” Inn at
    Henley-on-Thames--The Defence--Miss Blandy’s Exit.


There is a new series of _State Trials_ continuing the old, and edited
with a skill and completeness altogether lacking in its predecessor;
yet its formal correctness gives an impression of dulness. You
think with regret of Howell’s thirty-three huge volumes, that vast
magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst
in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and
how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug
comfort of our time! People shuddered of yore; did they yawn quite so
often? Howell and the folk he edits knew how to tell a story. Judges,
too, were not wont to exclude interesting detail for that it wasn’t
evidence, and the compilers did not end with a man’s condemnation.
They had too keen a sense of what was relished of the general: the
last confession and dying speech, the exit on the scaffold or from the
cart, are told with infinite gusto. What a terrible test earth’s great
unfortunates underwent! Sir Thomas More’s delicate fencing with his
judges, the exquisite courtesy wherewith he bade them farewell, make
but half the record; you must hear the strange gaiety which flashed
in the condemned cell and by the block ere you learn the man’s true
nature. And to know Raleigh you must see him at Winchester under the
brutal insults of Coke; “Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face
but a Spanish heart;” again, “I thou thee, thou traitor!” and at Palace
Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to
hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the
ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly
dressed, stately, and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture in
his Elizabethan warship sweeping the Spanish Main. Time would fail
to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for
the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to
Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close packed, badly
printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than
cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart’s
ending has a finer hold than Froude’s magnificent and highly decorated
picture--Study at first hand “Bloody Jeffreys,” his slogging of Titus
Oates, with that unabashed rascal’s replies during his trial for
perjury; or again, my Lord’s brilliant though brutal cross-examination
of Dunn in the “Lady” Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous
Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay’s wealth of vituperative
rhetoric, in comparison, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you
will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of
Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in
1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson’s
master-hand has limned in _Weir of Hermiston_.

But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors
are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance,
in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with
stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic
necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway
in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from
meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I
deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals
have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of
long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the _vie intime_ of a
past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master
and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed,
what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls
the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! _Benefit of
clergy_ meets you at every turn, the _Peine Fort et Dure_ is explained
with horrible minuteness, the lore of _Ship Money_ as well as of
_Impressment of Seamen_ is all there. Also is an occasional touch of
farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old
tomes?

Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then
purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In
a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice,
but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is
“a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however
antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So,
partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in
altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots
of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.

The first is the case of Philip Standsfield, tried at Edinburgh, in
1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New
Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it
lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There
is a fine mansion-house about a century old in the midst of a well
wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as
_dulcia arva_ as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its present name
thus: Colonel Charteris, infamed (in the phrase of Arbuthnot’s famous
epitaph) for the “undeviating pravity of his manners” (hence lashed by
Pope in many a stinging line), purchased it early in the last century
and re-named it from the seat of his family in Nithsdale. Through him
it passed by descent to the house of Wemyss, still its owners. Amongst
its trees and its waters the place lies away from the beaten track and
is now as charmingly peaceful a spot as you shall anywhere discover.
Name gone and aspect changed, local tradition has but a vague memory
of the two-centuries-old tragedy whereof it was the centre.

Sir James Standsfield, an Englishman by birth, had married a Scots lady
and spent most of his life in Scotland. After the Restoration he had
established a successful cloth factory at the place called New Mills,
and there lived, a prosperous gentleman. But he had much domestic
trouble chiefly from the conduct of his eldest son Philip, who, though
well brought up, led a wild life. Whilst “this profligate youth” (so
Wodrow, who tells the story, dubs him) was a student at the University
of St. Andrews, curiosity or mischief led him to attend a conventicle
where godly Mr. John Welch was holding forth. Using a chance loaf as
a missile, he smote the astonished divine, who, failing to discover
the culprit, was moved to prophecy. “There would be,” he thundered,
“more present at the death of him who did it, than were hearing him
that day; and the multitude was not small.” Graver matters than this
freak stained the lad’s later career. Serving abroad in the Scots
regiment, he had been condemned to death at Treves, but had escaped by
flight. Certain notorious villainies had also made him familiar with
the interior of the Marshalsea and the prisons of Brussels, Antwerp,
and Orleans. Sir James at last was moved to disinherit him in favour
of his second son John. Partly cause and partly effect of this,
Philip was given to cursing his father in most extravagant terms (of
itself a capital offence according to old Scots law); he affirmed his
parent “girned upon him like a sheep’s head in a tongs;” on several
occasions he had even attempted that parent’s life: all which is set
forth at great length in the “ditty” or indictment upon which he was
tried. No doubt Sir James went in considerable fear of his unnatural
son. A certain Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, advocate, testifies that eight
days before the end he met the old gentleman in the Parliament Close,
Edinburgh, whereupon “the defunct invited him to take his morning
draught.” As they partook Sir James bemoaned his domestic troubles.
“Yes,” said Mackenzie, but why had he disherished his son? And the
defunct answered: “Ye do not know my son, for he is the greatest
debauch in the earth. And that which troubles me most is that he twice
attempted my own person.”

Upon the last Saturday of November 1687, the elder Standsfield
travelled from Edinburgh to New Mills in company with Mr. John
Bell, minister of the Gospel, who was to officiate the next day in
Morham Church (Morham is a secluded parish on the lower <DW72> of the
Lammermoors, some three miles south-west of New Mills; the church
plays an important part in what follows). Arrived at New Mills the
pair supped together, thereafter the host accompanied his guest to
his chamber, where he sat talking “pertinently and to good purpose”
till about ten o’clock. Left alone, our divine gat him to bed, but had
scarce fallen asleep when he awoke in terror, for a terrible cry rang
through the silence of the winter night. A confused murmur of voices
and a noise of folk moving about succeeded. Mr. Bell incontinently
set all down to “evil wicked spirits,” so having seen to the bolts of
his chamber door, and having fortified his timid soul with prayers, he
huddled in bed again; but the voices and noises continuing outside the
house he crept to the window, where peering out he perceived nought
in the darkness. The noises died away across the garden towards the
river, and Bell lay quaking till the morning. An hour after day Philip
came to his chamber to ask if his father had been there, for he had
been seeking him upon the banks of the water. “Why on the banks of
that water?” queried Bell in natural amazement. Without answer Philip
hurriedly left the room. Later that same Sunday morning a certain
John Topping coming from Monkrig to New Mills, along the bank of the
Tyne, saw a man’s body floating on the water. Philip, drawn to the
spot by some terrible fascination, was looking on (you picture his
face). “Whose body was it?” asked the horror-struck Topping, but
Philip replied not. Well _he_ knew it was his father’s corpse. It was
noted that, though a hard frosty morning, the bank was “all beaten
to mash with feet and the ground very open and mellow.” The dead man
being presently dragged forth and carried home was refused entry by
Philip into the house so late his own, “for he had not died like a man
but like a beast,”--the suggestion being that his father had drowned
himself,--and so the poor remains must rest in the woollen mill, and
then in a cellar “where there was very little light.” The gossips
retailed unseemly fragments of scandal, as “within an hour after his
father’s body was brought from the water, he got the buckles from
his father’s shoes and put them in his;” and again, there is note
of a hideous and sordid quarrel between Lady Standsfield and Janet
Johnstoun, “who was his own concubine,” so the prosecution averred,
“about some remains of the Holland of the woonding-sheet,” with some
incriminating words of Philip that accompanied.

I now take up the story as given by Umphrey Spurway, described as an
Englishman and clothier at New Mills. His suspicions caused him to
write to Edinburgh that the Lord Advocate might be warned. Philip
lost no time in trying to prevent an inquiry. At three or four of the
clock on Monday morning Spurway, coming out of his house, saw “great
lights at Sir James’ Gate;” grouped round were men and horses. He was
told they were taking away the body to be buried at Morham, whereat
honest Umphrey, much disturbed at this suspicious haste, sighed for the
“crowner’s quest law” of his fatherland. But on the next Tuesday night
after he had gone to bed a party of five men, two of them surgeons,
came post haste to his house from Edinburgh, and showing him an order
“from my Lord Advocat for the taking up again the body of Sir James
Standsfield,” bid him rise and come. Philip also must go with the party
to Morham. Here the grave was opened, the body taken out and carried
into the church, where the surgeons made their examination, which
clearly pointed to death by strangulation not by drowning (possibly
it struck Spurway as an odd use for a church; it had not seemed so
to a presbyterian Scot of the period). The dead being re-dressed in
his grave clothes must now be set back in his coffin. A terrible thing
happened. According to Scots custom the nearest relative must lift the
body, and so Philip took the head, when lo! the corpse gushed forth
blood on his hands! He dropped the head--the “considerable noise” it
made in falling is noted by one of the surgeons--frantically essayed
to wipe off the blood on his clothes, and with frenzied cries of “Lord
have mercy upon me, Lord have mercy upon us!” fell half swooning across
a seat. Strong cordials were administered, and in time he regained his
sullen composure.

A strange scene to ponder over, but how terrible to witness! Think of
it! The lonely church on the Lammermoors, the dead vast and middle
of the dreary night (November 30, 1687), the murdered man, and the
Parricide’s confession (it is so set forth in the “ditty”) wrung from
him (as all believed) by the direct interposition of Providence. What
fiction ever equalled this gruesome horror? Even his mother, who had
sided with him against the father, scarce professed to believe his
innocence. “What if they should put her bairn in prison?” she wailed.
“Her bairn” was soon hard and fast in the gloomy old Tolbooth of
Edinburgh, to which, as the _Heart of Midlothian_, Scott’s novel was in
future days to give a world-wide fame.

The trial came on February 6 ensuing. In Scotland there is no inquest
or public magisterial examination to discount the interest of the
story, and the crowd that listened in the Parliament House to the
evidence already detailed had their bellyful of surprises and horrors.
The Crown had still in reserve this testimony, sensational and deadly.
The prosecution proposed to call James Thomson, a boy of thirteen, and
Anna Mark, a girl of ten. Their tender years were objected. My Lords,
declining to receive them as witnesses, oddly enough consented at the
request of the jury to take their declaration. The boy told how Philip
came to his father’s house on the night of the murder. The lad was
hurried off to bed, but listened whilst the panel, Janet Johnstoun,
already mentioned, and his father and mother softly whispered together
for a long time, until Philip’s rage got the better of his discretion,
and he loudly cursed his father and threatened his life. Next Philip
and Janet left the house, and in the dead of night his father and
mother followed. After two hours they crept back again; and the boy,
supposed to be sleeping, heard them whisper to each other the story of
the murder, how Philip guarded the chamber door “with a drawn sword
and a bendit pistol,” how it was strange a man should die so soon, how
they earned the body to the water and threw it in, and how his mother
ever since was afraid to stay alone in the house after nightfall. The
evidence of Anna Mark was as to certain criminating words used by her
mother Janet Johnstoun.

Up to this time the panel had been defended by four eminent advocates
mercifully appointed thereto by the Privy Council; there had been the
usual Allegations, Replyes, and Duplies, with frequent citations from
Mattheus, Carpzovius, Muscard, and the other fossils, as to the matters
contained in the “ditty” (indictment), and they had strenuously fought
for him till now, but after the statement of the children they retired.
Then Sir George Mackenzie rose to reply for the Crown. Famous in his
own day, his name is not yet forgotten. He was “the bluidy advocate
Mackenzie” of Covenanting legend and tradition, one of the figures in
Wandering Willie’s tale in _Redgauntlet_ (“who for his worldly wit
and wisdom had been to the rest as a god”). He had been Lord Advocate
already, and was presently to be Lord Advocate again. Nominally but
second counsel he seems to have conducted the whole prosecution. He had
a strong case, and he made the most of it. Passionate invective and
prejudicial matter were mixed with legal argument. Cultured politician
and jurist as he was, he dwelt with terrible emphasis on the scene in
Morham kirk. “God Almighty Himself was pleased to bear a share in
the testimonies which we produce.” Nor was the children’s testimony
forgotten. “I need not fortifie so pregnant a probation.” No! yet he
omitted not to protest for “an Assize of Error against the inquest
in the case they should assoilzie the pannal”--a plain intimation to
jury that if they found Philip Standsfield “not guilty” they were
liable to be prosecuted for an unjust verdict. But how to doubt after
such evidence? The jury straightway declared the panel guilty, and my
lords pronounced a sentence of picturesque barbarity. Standsfield was
to be hanged at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh, his tongue cut out and
burned upon the scaffold, his right hand fixed above the east port
of Haddington, and his dead body hung in chains upon the Gallow Lee
betwixt Leith and Edinburgh, his name disgraced for ever, and all his
property forfeited to the Crown. According to the old Scots custom the
sentence was given “by the mouth of John Leslie, dempster of court”--an
office held along with that of hangman. “Which is pronounced for doom”
was the formula wherewith he concluded.

On February 15 Standsfield though led to the scaffold was reprieved
for eight days “at the priest’s desire, who had been tampering to
turn <DW7>” (one remembers these were the last days of James II.,
or as they called him in Scotland, James VII.’s reign). Nothing came
of the delay, and when finally brought out on the 24th “he called
for Presbyterian ministers.” Through some slipping of the rope, the
execution was bungled; finally the hangman strangled his patient. The
“near resemblance of his father’s death” is noted by an eye-witness.
“Yet Edmund was beloved.” Leave was asked to bury the remains. One
fancies this was on the part of Lady Standsfield, regarding whose
complicity and doting fondness, strange stories were current. The
prayer was refused, but the body was found lying in a ditch a few days
after, and again the gossips (with a truly impious desire to “force the
hand” of Providence) saw a likeness to the father’s end. Once more the
body was taken down and presently vanished.

Lord Fountainhall, a contempory of Standsfield, and Sir Walter Scott,
both Scots lawyers of high official position, thought the evidence of
Standsfield’s guilt not altogether conclusive, and believed something
might be urged for the alternative theory of suicide. Whilst venturing
to differ, I note the opinion of such eminent authorities with all
respect.

Standsfield maintained his innocence to the last. Three servants of
his father’s--two men and a woman--were seized and tortured with the
thumbikins. They confessed nothing. Now, torture was frequently used
in old Scots criminal procedure, but if you did not confess you were
almost held to have proved your innocence.

I cannot discover the after fate of these servants, and probably
they were banished--a favourite method with the Scots authorities
for getting rid of objectionable characters whose guilt was not
sufficiently proved.

The second case, not so romantic albeit a love-story is woven through
its tangled threads, is that of Mary Blandy, spinster, tried at
Oxford in 1752, before two of the Barons of the Exchequer, for the
murder of her father, Francis Blandy, attorney, and town clerk of
Henley-on-Thames. Prosecuting counsel described her as “genteel,
agreeable, sprightly, sensible.” She was an only child. Her sire
being well off she seemed an eligible match, and yet wooers tarried.
Some years before the murder, the villain of the piece, William Henry
Cranstoun, a younger son of the Scots Lord Cranstoun and an officer
recruiting at Henley for the army, comes on the scene. Contemporary
gossip paints him the blackest colour. “His shape no ways genteel, his
legs clumsy, he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner.” He was
remarkable for his dulness; he was dissipated and poverty-stricken.
More fatal than all he had a wife and child in Scotland, though he
brazenly declared the marriage invalid spite the judgment of the Scots
courts in its favour. Our respectable attorney, upon discovering these
facts, gave the Captain, as he was called, the cold shoulder. The
prospect of a match with a Lord’s son was too much for Miss Blandy, now
over thirty, and she was ready to believe any ridiculous yarn he spun
about his northern entanglements. Fired by an exaggerated idea of old
Blandy’s riches, he planned his death, and found in the daughter an
agent and, as the prosecution averred, an accomplice.

The way was prepared by a cunning use of popular superstitions.
Mysterious sounds of music were heard about; at least Cranstoun said
so; indeed, it was afterwards alleged he “hired a band to play under
the windows.” If any one asked “What then?” he whispered “that a
wise woman, one Mrs. Morgan, in Scotland,” had assured him that such
was a sign of death to the head of the house within twelve months.
The Captain further alleged that he held the gift of second sight
and had seen the worthy attorney’s ghost; all which, being carefully
reported to the servants by Miss Blandy raised a pleasing horror in the
kitchen. Cranstoun, from necessity or prudence, left Henley before the
diabolical work began in earnest, but he supplied Mary with arsenic
in powder, which she administered to her father for many months. The
doses were so immoderate that the unfortunate man’s teeth dropped whole
from their sockets, whereat the undutiful daughter “damn’d him for a
toothless old rogue and wished him to hell.” Cranstoun, under the guise
of a present of Scotch pebbles, sent her some more arsenic, nominally
to rub them with. In the accompanying letter, July 18, 1751, he
glowingly touched on the beauties of Scotland as an inducement to her,
it was supposed, to make haste. Rather zealous than discreet, she near
poisoned Anne Emmett, the charwoman, by misadventure, but brought her
round again with great quantities of sack whey and thin mutton broth,
sovereign remedies against arsenic.

Her father gradually became desperately ill. Susannah Gunnell,
maidservant perceiving a white powder at the bottom of a dish she was
cleaning had it preserved. It proved to be arsenic, and was produced
at the trial. Susannah actually told Mr. Blandy he was being poisoned;
but he only remarked, “Poor lovesick girl! what will not a woman do for
the man she loves?” Both master and maid fixed the chief, perhaps the
whole, guilt on Cranstoun, the father confining himself to dropping
some strong hints to his daughter, which made her throw Cranstoun’s
letters and the remainder of the poison on the fire, wherefrom the drug
was in secret rescued and preserved by the servants.

Mr. Blandy was now hopelessly ill, and though experienced doctors
were at length called in, he expired on Wednesday, August 14, 1751.
The sordid tragedy gets its most pathetic and highest touch from the
attempts made by the dying man to shield his daughter and to hinder
her from incriminating admissions which under excitement and (one
hopes) remorse she began to make. And in his last hours he spoke to her
words of pardon and solace. That night and again on Thursday morning
the daughter made some distracted efforts to escape. “I ran out of
the house and over the bridge, and had nothing on but a half-sack and
petticoat without a hoop--my petticoats hanging about me.” But now
all Henley was crowded round the dwelling to watch the development of
events. The mob pressed after the distracted girl, who took refuge
at the sign of the Angel, a small inn just across the bridge. “They
were going to open her father,” she said, and “she could not bear the
house.” She was taken home and presently committed to Oxford Gaol to
await her trial. Here she was visited by the high sheriff, who “told me
by order of the higher powers he must put an iron on me. I submitted as
I always do to the higher powers” (she had little choice). Spite her
terrible position and these indignities she behaved with calmness and
courage.

The trial, which lasted twelve hours, took place on February 29, 1752,
in the Divinity School of the University. The prisoner was “sedate
and composed without levity or dejection.” Accused of felony, she had
properly counsel only for points of law, but at her request they were
allowed to examine and cross-examine the witnesses. Herself spoke
a defence possibly prepared by her advisers, for though the style
be artless, the reasoning is exceeding ingenious. She admitted she
was passionate and thus accounted for some hasty expressions; the
malevolence of servants had exaggerated these. Betty Binfield, one of
the maids, was credibly reported to have said of her, “she should be
glad to see the black bitch go up the ladder to be hanged.” But the
powder? Impossible to deny she had administered that. “I gave it to
procure his love.” Cranstoun, she affirmed, had sent it from Scotland,
assuring her that it would so work, and Scotland, one notes, seemed to
everybody “the shores of old romance,” the home of magic incantations
and mysterious charms. It was powerfully objected that Francis Blandy
had never failed in love to his daughter, but she replied that the drug
was given to reconcile her father to Cranstoun. She granted he meant to
kill the old man in hopes to get his money, and she was the agent, but
(she asserted) the innocent agent, of his wicked purpose. This theory
though the best available was beset with difficulties. She had made
many incriminating statements, there was the long time over which the
doses had been spread, there was her knowledge of its effects on Anne
Emmett the charwoman, there was the destruction of Cranstoun’s letters,
the production of which would have conclusively shown the exact measure
in which guilty knowledge was shared. Finally, there was the attempt to
destroy the powder. Bathurst, leading counsel for the Crown, delivered
two highly rhetorical speeches, “drawing floods of tears from the most
learned audience that perhaps ever attended an English Provincial
Tribunal.” The jury after some five minutes’ consultation in the box
returned a verdict of “guilty,” which the prisoner received with
perfect composure. All she asked was a little time “till I can settle
my affairs and make my peace with God,” and this was readily granted.
She was left in prison five weeks.

The case continued to excite enormous interest, increased by an
account which she issued from prison of her father’s death and her
relations with Cranstoun. She was constant in her professions of
innocence, “nor did anything during the whole course of her confinement
so extremely shock her as the charge of infidelity which some
uncharitable persons a little before her death brought against her.”
Some were convinced and denied her guilt, “as if,” said Horace Walpole,
“a woman who would not stick at parricide would scruple a lie.” Others
said she had hopes of pardon “from the Honour she had formerly had of
dancing for several nights with the late P----e of W----s, and being
personally known to the most sweet-tempered P--ess in the world.” The
press swarmed with pamphlets. The Cranstoun correspondence, alleged not
destroyed, was published--a very palpable Grub Street forgery! and a
tragedy, _The Fair Parricide_, dismal in every sense, was inflicted on
the world. The last scene of all was on April 6, 1752. “Miss Blandy
suffered in a black bombazine short sack and petticoat, with a clean
white handkerchief drawn over her face. Her hands were tied together
with a strong black riband, and her feet at her own request almost
touched the ground” (“Gentlemen, don’t hang me high for the sake of
decency,” an illustration of British prudery which has escaped the
notice of French critics). She mounted the ladder with some hesitation.
“I am afraid I shall fall.” For the last time she declared her
innocence, and soon all was over. “The number of people attending her
execution was computed at about 5000, many of whom, and particularly
several gentlemen of the university, were observed to shed tears”
(tender-hearted “gentlemen of the university”!) “In about half an hour
the body was cut down and carried through the crowd upon the shoulders
of a man with her legs exposed very indecently.” Late the same night
she was laid beside her father and mother in Henley Church.

Cranstoun fled from justice and was outlawed. In December that same
year he died in Flanders.




Some Disused Roads to Matrimony

    Marriage according to the Canon Law--The English
    Law--Peculiars--The Fleet Chapel--Marriage Houses--“The Bishop of
    Hell”--Ludgate Hill in the Olden Time--Marriages Wholesale--The
    Parsons of the Fleet--Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act--The Fleet
    Registers--Keith’s Chapel in May Fair--The Savoy Chapel--The Scots
    Marriage Law--The Strange Case of Joseph Atkinson--Gretna Green in
    Romance and Reality--The Priests--Their Clients--A Pair of Lord
    High Chancellors--Lord Brougham’s Marriage Act--The Decay of the
    Picturesque.


“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The marrying in the
Fleet is the beginning of eternal woe.” So scribbled (1736) Walter
Wyatt, a Fleet Parson, in one of his note-books. He and his likes are
long vanished, and his successor the blacksmith priest (in truth he was
neither one nor other) of Gretna is also gone; yet their story is no
less entertaining than instructive, and here I set it forth.

Some prefatory matter is necessary for the right understanding of
what follows. Marriage, whatever else it may or may not be, is a
contract of two consenting minds; but at an early age the church put
forth the doctrine that it was likewise a sacrament which could be
administered by the contracting parties to each other. Pope Innocent
III., in 1215, first ordained--so some authorities say--that marriages
must be celebrated in church; but it was not yet decreed that other
and simpler methods were without effect. According to the canon law,
“espousals” were of two kinds: _sponsalia per verba de præsenti_--which
was an agreement to marry forthwith; and _sponsalia per verba de
futuro_--which was a contract to wed at a future time. Consummation
gave number two the effect of number one, and civilly that effect was
the same as of duly celebrated nuptials; inasmuch as the church, while
urging the religious ceremony upon the faithful as the sole proper
method, admitted the validity of the others--_quod non fieri debit
id factum valeat_ (so the maxim ran). The common law adopting this,
held that (1) marriage might be celebrated with the full rites of the
church; or (2) that the parties might take each other for man and
wife; or (3), which obviously followed, that a priest might perform
the ceremony outside the church, or without the full ceremonial--with
maimed rites, so to speak. Whatever penalties were incurred by
following other than the first way the marriage itself held good.

I must here note that in 1844, in the case of _The Queen against
Millis_, the House of Lords _seemed_ to decide that there could not
have been a valid marriage in England, even before Lord Hardwicke’s
Act, which in 1753 completely changed the law, in the absence of an
ordained ecclesiastic. The arguments and the judgment fill the half
of one of Clark and Finnelly’s bulky volumes, and never was matter
more thoroughly threshed, and winnowed, and garnered. The House was
equally divided; and the opinion of the Irish Court of Queen’s Bench,
which maintained the necessity of the priest’s presence, was affirmed.
The real explanation, I think, is that, though the old canon law and
the old common law were as I have stated, yet English folk had got so
much into the habit of calling in the Parson that his presence came to
be regarded as essential. The parties, even when they disobeyed the
church by leaving undone much they were ordered to do, would still have
“something religious” about the ceremony. In 1563 the Council of Trent
declared such marriages invalid as were not duly celebrated in church;
but Elizabeth’s reign was already five years gone, both England and
Scotland had broken decisively with the old faith, and the Council’s
decrees had no force here.

In England both church and state kept tinkering the Marriage Laws. In
1603 the Convocation for the Province of Canterbury declared that no
minister shall solemnise matrimony without banns or licence upon pain
of suspension for three years. Also, all marriages were to be in the
parish church between eight and twelve in the forenoon. Nothing so far
affected the validity of the business; and “clandestine marriages,”
as they were called, became frequent. In 1695, an Act of William III.
fined the Parson who assisted at such couplings one hundred pounds for
the first offence, and for the second suspended him for three years.
This enactment was followed almost immediately by another, which
mulcted the clergyman who celebrated or permitted any such marriage in
his church as well as the bridegroom and the clerk. The main object
of this legislation was to prevent the loss of duties payable upon
regularly performed marriages; but it strengthened ecclesiastical
discipline.

Thus your correct wedding, then as now, had its tedious preliminaries;
but the fashion of the time imposed some other burdens. There was
inordinate feasting with music and gifts and altogether much expense
and delay. Poor folk could ill afford the business; now and again
the rich desired a private ceremony; here and there young people
sighed for a runaway match. Also, outside this trim and commonplace
century the nation’s life had not that smoothness which seems to us
such a matter of course. Passion was stronger and worse disciplined;
law, though harsh, was slow and uncertain. How tempting, then, the
inducement to needy persons to marry cheaply and without ceremony! Now,
London had a number of places of worship called _Peculiars_, which,
as royal chapels, possessions of the Lord Mayor and alderman, or what
not, claimed, rightly or wrongly, exemption from the visitation of
the ordinary. These were just the places for irregular or clandestine
marriages. Peculiars or not, as many as ninety chapels favoured such
affairs. Chief among them were the Savoy, the Minories, Mayfair
Chapel, and (above all) the Fleet, which--from a very early date
to half a century ago--was a famous prison especially for debtors,
standing on what is now the east side of Farringdon Street. It had
a chapel where marriages were properly solemnised by 1613, and (it
may be) earlier; but the records are somewhat scanty. Now, a number
of dissolute Parsons were “fleeted” (as the old phrase ran) for one
cause or another, and some might live outside the walls but within the
_rules_ or _liberties of the Fleet_, as the ground about the prison was
called. These obtained the use of the chapel, where, for a reasonable
consideration, they were willing to couple any brace forthwith. What
terror had the law for them? Men already in hold for debt laughed at a
fine, and suspension was a process slow and like to be ineffectual at
the last. The church feebly tried to exercise discipline. On June 4,
1702, the Bishop of London held a visitation _in carcere vulgo vocat’
ye Fleet in civitate London_. He found one Jeronimus Alley coupling
clients at a great rate. ’Twas hinted that Jeronimus was not a Parson
at all, and proof of his ordination was demanded; “but Mr. Alley soon
afterwards fled from _ye said prison_ and never exhibited his orders.”
Another record says that he obtained “some other preferment” (probably
he was playing the like game elsewhere).

The legislature, in despair, as it might seem, now struck at more
responsible heads. In 1712 a statute (10 Ann. c. 19) imposed the
penalty of a hundred pounds on keepers of gaols permitting marriage
without banns or licence within their walls. This closed the Fleet
Chapel to such nuptials, but private houses did just as well.
Broken-down Parsons, bond or free, were soon plentiful as blackberries;
and taverns stood at every corner; so at the “Two Fighting Men and
Walnut Tree,” at “The Green Canister,” at “The Bull and Garter,” at
“The Noah’s Ark,” at “The Horseshoe and Magpie,” at “Jack’s Last
Shift,” at “The Shepherd and Goat,” at “The Leg” (to name no more),
a room was fitted up in a sort of caricature of a chapel; and here
during the ceremony a clock with doubly brazen hands stood ever at one
of the canonical hours though without it might be midnight or three
in the morning. A Parson, hired at twenty shillings a week, “hit or
miss,” as ’twas curiously put, attended. The business was mostly done
on Sundays, Thursdays, and Fridays; but ready, ay ready, was the word.
The landlord or a servingman played clerk, and what more was wanted?

There were many orders of Fleet Parsons, some not parsons at all.
At the top of the tree was the “famous Dr. John Gaynam,” known as
the “Bishop of Hell:” he made a large income and in his time coupled
legions; and at the bottom were a parcel of fellows who would marry
any couple anywhere for anything. The Fleet Parson of standing kept a
pocket-book in which he roughly jotted down the particulars of each
marriage, transcribing the more essential details to a larger register
at home. Certificates, at a varying charge, were made out from these,
and the books being thus a source of profit were preserved with a
certain care. To falsify such documents was child’s play. Little
accidents (as a birth in the midst of the ceremony) were dissembled
by inserting the notice of the marriage in some odd corner of a more
or less ancient record. This antedating of registers was so common
as almost to deprive them of any value as evidence. Worse still,
certificates were now and again issued, though there had been no
marriage. Sometimes the taverners kept registers of their own, but how
to establish a fixed rule?

Not all the “marriage houses,” as they were called, were taverns. They
were often distinguished by some touching device: as a pair of clasping
hands with the legend “Marriages Performed Within.” A feature of the
system was the _plyer_ or _barker_, who, dressed in ragged and rusty
black, touted for Parson or publican, or it might be for self, vaunting
himself the while clerk and register to the Fleet. “These ministers
of wickedness” (thus, in 1735, a correspondent of _The Grub Street
Journal_) “ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling and forcing the people to
some peddling alehouse or a brandy-shop to be married, even on a Sunday
stopping them as they go to church, and almost tearing their clothes
off their backs.” If you drove Fleetwards with matrimony in your eye,
why, then you were fair game:--

  Scarce had the coach discharg’d its trusty fare,
  But gaping crowds surround th’ amorous pair.
  The busy plyers make a mighty stir,
  And whisp’ring, cry, “D’ye want the Parson, Sir?”

Yet the great bulk of Fleet marriages were in their own way orderly
and respectable. Poor people found them shortest and cheapest. Now and
again there are glimpses of rich or high-born couples: as, in 1744,
the Hon. H. Fox with Georgina Caroline, eldest daughter of Charles,
second Duke of Richmond, of which union Charles James was issue. One
odd species was a parish wedding: the churchwardens thought it an
ingenious device to bribe some blind or halting youth, the burden of a
neighbouring parish, to marry a female pauper chargeable to them; for,
being a wife she immediately acquired her husband’s settlement, and
they were rid of her. In one case they gave forty shillings and paid
the expense of a Fleet marriage; the rag, tag, and bobtail attended
in great numbers and a mighty racket was the result. According to the
law then and long after, a woman by marrying transferred the burden
of her debts to her husband. So some desperate spinsters hied them
Fleetwards to dish their creditors; plyer or Parson soon fished up a
man; and though, under different _aliases_, he were already wived like
the Turk, what mattered it? The wife had her “lines,” and how to prove
the thing a sham? Husbands, again, had a reasonable horror of their
wives’ antenuptial obligations. An old superstition, widely prevalent
in England, was that if you took nothing by your bride you escaped
liability. Obviously, then, the thing to do was to marry her in what
Winifred Jenkins calls “her birthday soot,” or thereabouts. So “the
woman ran across Ludgate Hill in a shift,” for thus was her state of
destitution made patent to all beholders.

When the royal fleet came in, the crews, “panged” full of gold and
glory, made straight for the taverns of Ratcliffe Highway, and of
them, there footing it with their Polls and Molls, some one asked,
“Why not get married?” Why not, indeed? Coaches are fetched; the party
make off to the Fleet; plyers, Parsons, and publicans, all welcome
them with open arms; the knots are tied in less than no time; there
is punch with the officiating cleric; the unblushing fair are crammed
into the coaches; Jack, his pocket lighter, his brain heavier, climbs
up on the box or holds on behind; the populace acclaims the procession
with old shoes, dead cats, and whatever Fleet Ditch filth comes handy;
and so back to their native _Radcliffe_, to spend their honeymoon in
“fiddling, piping, jigging, eating,” and to end the bout with a divorce
even less ceremonious than their nuptials. “It is a common thing,”
reports a tavern-keeper of that sea-boys’ paradise, “when a fleet comes
in to have two or three hundred marriages in a week’s time among the
sailors.”

The work was mostly done cheap: the Parson took what he could get, and
every one concerned must have his little bit. Thus, “the turnkey had
a shilling, Boyce (the acting clerk) had a shilling, the plyer had a
shilling, and the Parson had three and sixpence”--the total amounting
to six shillings and sixpence. This was a fair average, though now and
again the big-wigs netted large sums.

A Fleet marriage was as valid as another; but in trials for bigamy
the rub was: Had there been any marriage at all? Some accused would
strenuously maintain the negative. In 1737 Richard Leaver was indicted
at the Old Bailey for this offence; and “I know nothing about the
wedding,” was his ingenuous plea. “I was fuddled overnight and next
morning I found myself a-bed with a strange woman and ‘Who are you?
How came you here?’ says I. ‘O, my dear,’ says she, ‘we were marry’d
last night at the Fleet.’” More wonderful still was the story told
by one Dangerfield, charged the preceding year for marrying whilst
Arabella Fast, his first wife, was still alive. Arabella and he, so
he asserted, had plotted to blackmail a Parson with whom the lady
entertained relations all too fond. At ten at night he burst in upon
them as had been arranged. “‘Hey’ (says I), ‘how came you a-bed with
my spouse?’ ‘Sir,’ (says he), ‘I only lay with her to keep my back
warm.’” The explanation lacked probability, and “in the morning” the
erring divine acknowledged his mistake:--“I must make you a present if
you can produce a certificate” (he suspected something wrong, you see).
Dangerfield was gravelled. Not so the resourceful Arabella. “‘For a
crown I can get a certificate from the Fleet,’ she whispered; and ‘I
gave her a crown, and in half an hour she brings me a certificate.’”
The jury acquitted Dangerfield.

The clergyman said to have officiated in both cases was the “famous
Dr. Gaynam” (so a witness described him), the aforesaid “Bishop of
Hell.” How could he recollect an individual face, he asked, for had
he not married his thousands? But it must be right if it was in his
books: _he_ never altered or falsified _his_ register. “It was as fair
a register as any church in England can produce. I showed it last night
to the foreman of the jury, and my Lord Mayor’s clerk at the London
punch-house” (a noted Fleet tavern): so Gaynam swore at Robert Hussey’s
trial for bigamy in 1733. A familiar figure was the “Bishop” in Fleet
taverns and Old Bailey witness-box. At Dangerfield’s trial neither
counsel nor judge was very complimentary to him; but he was moved not a
whit; he was used to other than verbal attacks, and some years before
this he was soundly cudgelled at a wedding--in a dispute about his
fees, no doubt. “A very lusty, jolly man,” in full canonicals, a trifle
bespattered from that Fleet Ditch on whose banks he had spent many
a scandalous year, his florid person verging on over-ripeness, even
decay, for he vanishes four years later. Was he not ashamed of himself?
sneered counsel. Whereupon “he (bowing) _video meliora, deteriora
sequor_.” Don’t you see the reverend rogue complacently mouthing his
tag? He “flourished” ’twixt 1709 and 1740. On the fly-leaf of one of
his pocket-books he wrote:

  The Great Good Man w^m fortune may displace,
  May into scarceness fall, but not disgrace,
  His sacred person none will dare profane,
  Poor he may be, but never can be mean,
  He holds his value with the wise and good,
  And prostrate seems as great as when he stood.

The personal application was obvious; but alas for fame! Even in Mr.
Leslie Stephen’s mighty dictionary his record is to seek.

Time would fail to trace the unholy succession of Fleet Parsons. There
was Edward Ashwell (1734-1743), “a most notorious rogue and impostor.”
There was Peter Symson (1731-1754), who officiated at the “Old Red
Hand and Mitre,” headed his certificates G.R., and bounced after
this fashion:--“Marriages performed by authority by the Reverend Mr.
Symson, educated at the University of Cambridge, and late Chaplain to
the Earl of Rothes. N.B.--Without imposition.” Then there was James
Landow (1737-1743), late Chaplain to His Majesty’s ship _Falkland_,
who advertised “Marriage with a licence, certificate, and a crown
stamp at a guinea, at the New Chapel, next door to the China Shop,
near Fleet Bridge, London.” Of an earlier race was Mr. Robert Elborrow
(1698-1702): “a very ancient man and is master of ye chapple” (he seems
to have been really “the Parson of the Fleet”). His chief offence was
leaving everything to his none too scrupulous clerk, Bassett. There is
some mention also of the Reverend Mr. Nehemiah Rogers, a prisoner, “but
goes at large to his living in Essex and all places else.” Probably
they were glad to get rid of him for “he has struck and boxed ye
bridegroom in ye Chapple and damned like any com’on souldier.” _Mulli
praeterea, quos fama obscura recondit._ How to fix the identity of the
“tall black clergyman” who, hard by “The Cock” in Fleet Market, pressed
his services on loving couples? Was he one with the “tall Clergyman who
plies about the Fleet Gate for Weddings,” and who in 1734 was convicted
“of swearing forty-two Oaths and ordered to pay £4 2_s._”?

In 1753 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (26 Geo. II. cap. 3) put a sudden
stop to the doings of those worthies. Save in the case of Jews and
Quakers, all marriages were void unless preceded by banns or licence
and celebrated according to the rites of the Church of England in a
church or chapel of that communion. The Priest who assisted at an
irregular or clandestine marriage was guilty of a felony punishable
by fourteen years’ transportation. The Bill was violently opposed;
and, according to Horace Walpole, was crammed down the throats of both
Houses; but its policy, its effects, as well as later modifications of
the marriage law, are not for discussion here.

I turn to the registers wherein the doings of the Fleet Parsons are
more or less carefully recorded. In 1783 most of those still extant
had got into the hands of Mr. Benjamin Panton. “They weighed more than
a ton”; were purchased by the Government for £260 6_s._ 6_d._, and
to-day you may inspect them at Somerset House. There are between two
and three hundred large registers and a thousand or more pocket-books
(_temp._ 1674-1753). Not merely are the records of marriages curious
in themselves, but also they are often accompanied by curious comments
from the Parson, clerk, taverner, or whoever kept the book. The oddest
collection is in a volume of date 1727-1754. The writer used Greek
characters, though his words are English, and is as frank as Pepys,
and every bit as curious. Here are a few samples from the lot: “Had a
noise for four hours about the money” was to be expected where there
were no fixed rates; but “stole my clouthes-brush,” and “left a pott of
4 penny to pay,” and “ran away with the scertifycate and left a pint
of wine to pay for,” were surely cases of exceptional roguery. Curious
couples presented themselves:--“Her eyes very black and he beat about
ye face very much.” Again, the bridegroom was a boy of eighteen, the
bride sixty-five, “brought in a coach by four thumping ladies” (the
original is briefer and coarser) “out of Drury Lane as guests”; and yet
the Parson had “one shilling only.” He fared even worse at times. Once
he married a couple, money down, “for half a guinea,” after which “it
was extorted out of my pocket, and for fear of my life delivered.” Even
a Fleet Parson had his notion of propriety. “Behav’d very indecent and
rude to all,” is one entry; and “N.B. behav^d rogueshly. Broke the
Coachman’s Glass,” is another. Once his reverence, “having a mistrust
of some Irish roguery,” though the party seemed of better rank than
usual, asked indiscreet questions. The leader turned on him with the
true swagger of your brutal Georgian bully. “What was that to me?
G---- dem me, if I did not immediately marry them he would use me ill;
in short, apprehending it to be a conspiracy, I found myself obliged
to marry them _in terrorem_.” Again, he had better luck on another
occasion: “handsomely entertained,” he records; and of a bride of June
11, 1727, “the said Rachel, the prettiest woman I ever saw.” (You fancy
the smirk wherewith he scrawled that single record of the long vanished
beauty!) He is less complimentary to other clients. His “appear^d a
rogue” and “two most notorious thieves” had sure procured him a broken
pate had his patrons known! How gleefully and shamelessly he chronicles
his bits of sharp practice! “Took them from Brown who was going into
the next door with them,” was after all merely business; but what
follows is _not_. In 1729 he married Susannah Hewitt to Abraham Wells,
a butcher. The thing turned out ill; and in 1736 she came back, and
suggested annulment by the simple expedient of destroying the record;
when “I made her believe I did so, for which I had a half a guinea.”
Nor was there much honour among the crew of thieves. “Total three and
sixpence, but honest Wigmore kept all the money so farewell him,” is an
entry by the keeper of a marriage house, whom a notorious Fleet Parson
had dished. Another is by a substitute for the same divine:--“Wigmore
being sent for but was drunk, so I was a stopgap.” I confess to a
sneaking fondness for those entertaining rascals, but enough of their
pranks.

Of the other places where irregular marriages were celebrated two
demand some notice. One was Keith’s Chapel in Mayfair, “a very
bishopric of revenue” to that notorious “marriage broker” the Reverend
Alexander Keith. His charge was a guinea, and, being strictly
inclusive, covered “the Licence on a Crown Stamp, Minister’s and
Clerk’s fees, together with the certificate.” No wonder he did a
roaring trade! Keith seemed a nobler quarry than the common Fleet
Parson, and the ecclesiastical authorities pursued him in their courts.
In October 1742, he was excommunicated: with matchless impudence he
retorted by excommunicating his persecutors from the Bishop downwards.
Next year they stuck him in the Fleet; but, through Parsons as reckless
as himself, he continued to “run” his chapel. In 1749 he made his
wife’s death an occasion for advertisement: the public was informed
that the corpse, being embalmed, was removed “to an apothecary’s in
South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning,
and is to continue there until Mr. Keith can attend her funeral.”
Then follows an account of the chapel. One authority states that six
thousand marriages were celebrated there within twelve months; but
this seems incredible. That sixty-one couples were united the day
before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law is like enough. Here took
place, in 1752, the famous marriage of the fourth Duke of Hamilton to
the youngest of the “beautiful Miss Gunnings,” “with a ring of the
bed curtain half an hour after twelve at night,” as Horace Walpole
tells. And here, in September 1748, at a like uncanny hour, “handsome
Tracy was united to the butterman’s daughter in Craven Street.” Lord
Hardwicke’s Act was elegantly described as “an unhappy stroke of
fortune” by our enterprising divine. At first he threatened another
form of competition:--“I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and by God
I’ll under-bury them all.” But in the end he had to own himself ruined.
He had scarce anything, he moaned, but bread and water, although he had
been wont to expend “almost his whole Income (which amounted yearly
to several Hundred Pounds per Annum) in relieving not only single
distressed Persons, but even whole Families of wretched Objects of
Compassion.” The world neither believed nor pitied; and he died in the
Fleet on December 17, 1758.

Last of all comes the Savoy. There, _The Public Advertiser_ of January
2, 1754, announced, marriages were performed “with the utmost privacy,
decency, and regularity, the expense not more than one guinea, the
five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to
this chapel, and two by water.” The Reverend John Williamson, “His
Majesty’s Chaplain of the Savoy,” asserted that as such he could grant
licences; and despite the Act he went on coupling. In 1755 he married
the enormous number of one thousand one hundred and ninety; half the
brides being visibly in an interesting condition. The authorities,
having warned him time and again to no purpose, at last commenced
proceedings. But he evaded arrest by skipping over roofs and vanishing
through back doors, in a manner inexplicable to us to-day; and went
on issuing licences, while his curate, Mr. Grierson, did the actual
work at the altar. Grierson, however, was seized and transported for
fourteen years: then his chief surrendered (1756), stood his trial, and
received a like sentence; the irregular marriages both had performed
being declared of no effect.

What now were the amorous to do? Well, there were divers makeshifts.
Thus, at Southampton (_temp._ 1750), a boat was held ever ready to
sail for Guernsey with any couple able and willing to pay five pounds.
Ireland did not impress itself on the lovers’ imagination: it may be
that the thought of that gruesome middle passage “froze the genial
current of their souls.” But there was a North as well as a South
Britain; and--what was more to the purpose--the Scots marriage law
was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into
which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any
time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in
good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however
important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the
Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but
the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. Couples of
set purpose confessed their vows, got a small fine inflicted, and
there was legal evidence of their union! Ecclesiastical discipline was
strict enough to prevent regularly instituted Scots ministers from
assisting at such affairs. But any man would do (for, after all, he was
but a witness), and the first across the Border as well as or better
than another. Now, by a well-known principle of international law,
the _lex loci contractus_ governs such contracts: the marriage being
valid in Scotland where it took place, was also recognised as valid in
England where its celebration would have been a criminal offence! This
was curiously illustrated early in the century by the case of Joseph
Atkinson. The Border, I must explain, had all along been given to
irregular marriages, and different localities in Scotland were used as
best suited the parties. Lamberton Toll Bar, N.B., lay four miles north
of Berwick-on-Tweed; and here our Atkinson did a thriving business in
the coupling line. One fine day he had gone to Berwick when a couple
sought his service at the toll-house. A quaint fiction presumes that
everybody knows the law; but here it turned out that nobody did, for
the bride and groom instead of uniting themselves before the first
comer rushed off to Berwick, and were there wedded by Lamberton. And
not only was the affair a nullity; but the unfortunate coupler was
sentenced to seven years’ transportation for offending against the
English marriage laws.

Most of them, however, that went North on marriage bent, took the
Carlisle road. A few miles beyond that city the little river Sark
divides the two countries. Just over the bridge is the toll-house:
a footpath to the right takes you to Springfield. Till about 1826
the North road lay through this village; then, however, the way was
changed, and ran by Gretna Green, which is nine and a half miles
from Carlisle. These two places, together with the toll-house, are
all in Gretna parish; but of course the best known is Gretna Green:
“the resort” (wrote Pennant) “of all amorous couples whose union
the prudence of parents or guardians prohibits.” The place acquired
a world-wide fame: that English plays and novels should abound in
references to it, as they had done to the Fleet, was only natural;
but one of George Sand’s heroes elopes thither with a banker’s
daughter, and even Victor Hugo hymns it in melodious verse, albeit his
pronunciation is a little peculiar:

  La mousse des près exhale
  Avril, qui chante drin, drin,
  Et met une succursale
  De Cythère à Gretna Green.

And how to explain the fact that people hurried from the remotest
parts of Scotland as well as from England, though any square yard of
soil “frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s” had served their purpose just
as well? The parishioners, indeed, sought not the service of their
self-appointed priest; but is there not an ancient saying as to the
prophet’s lack of honour among his own people?

Now, if you travelled North in proper style, in a chaise and four, with
post-boys and so forth, you went to the “King’s Head” at Springfield,
or, after the change of road, more probably to Gretna Hall; but your
exact halting-place was determined at Carlisle. The postillions there,
being in league with one or other of the Gretna innkeepers, took you
willy-nilly to one or the other hostelry. Were you poor and tramped
it, you were glad to get the knot tied at the toll-house. Most of the
business fell into a few hands. Indeed, the landlords of the various
inns instead of performing the rite themselves usually sent for a
so-called priest. A certificate after this sort was given to the wedded
couple:--“Kingdom of Scotland, County of Dumfries, Parish of Gretna:
these are to certify to all whom it may concern that (here followed the
names) by me, both being present and having declared to me that they
are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the law
of Scotland.” This the parties and their witnesses subscribed.

I shall not attempt to trace the obscure succession of Gretna Green
priests. Joseph Paisley, who died in 1811, aged eighty-four, was, it
seems, the original blacksmith; but he was no son of Tubal Cain,
though he had been fisher, smuggler, tobacconist. He united man with
woman even as the smith welds iron with iron--thus the learned explain
his title. After Paisley, and connected with him by marriage, there
was Robert Elliott, and several people of the name of Laing. In some
rather amusing memoirs Elliott assures us that between 1811 and 1839 he
performed three thousand eight hundred and seventy-two marriages; also
that his best year was 1825, when he did one hundred and ninety-eight,
and his worst 1839, when he did but forty-two. At the toll-bar there
was a different line, whose most picturesque figure was Gordon, the old
soldier. Gordon officiated in full regimentals, a large cocked hat on
his head and a sword by his side. Here, too, Beattie reigned for some
years before 1843. His occupation went to his head, for latterly he
had a craze for marrying, so that he would creep up behind any chance
couple and begin to mumble the magic words that made them one. The law
has ever terrors for the unlettered, and the rustic bachelor fled at
Beattie’s approach, as if he had been the pest. The “priests” sometimes
used a mangled form of the Church of England service: which irreverence
was probably intended as a delicate compliment to the nationality of
most of their clients. The fees were uncertain. When the trembling
parties stood hand in hand in inn or toll-bar, whilst the hoofs of
pursuing post-horses thundered ever nearer, ever louder, or it might be
that irate father or guardian battered at the door, it was no time to
bargain. The “priest” saw his chance; and now and again he pouched as
much as a hundred pounds.

Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story
of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child,
the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but
money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping
towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their
trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his
carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late
after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady
Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune
and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826,
of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by
an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple
were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted
William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,”
was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He
was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to
three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8
Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended
strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation”
writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors
must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord
Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees,
the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan,
minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was
a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October
1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck
(said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one
fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as
to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange
pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace
of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his
cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still
a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out
of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held
under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the
law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the
presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As
far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5,
1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns,
on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and
her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry
on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me
in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to
Jean Armour. And the thing did not come off, so that bigamy is not to
be reckoned among the poet’s sins.

They were rather sordid affairs in the end, those Gretna Green
marriages. So, at least, the Reverend James Roddick, minister of
the parish, writing of the place in 1834 in the _New Statistical
Account_, would have us believe. There were three or four hundred
marriages annually: “the parties are chiefly from the sister kingdom
and from the lowest rank of the population.” A number came from
Carlisle at fair-time, got married, spent a few days together, and
then divorced themselves. Competition had brought down the priest’s
fee to half-a-crown, and every tippling-house had its own official.
Nay, the very roadman on the highway that joined the kingdoms pressed
his services on all and sundry! And then the railway came to Gretna,
and you had the spectacle of “priests” touting on the platform. Alas
for those shores of old Romance! In 1856, Lord Brougham’s Act (19 &
20 Vict. cap. 96), made well-nigh as summary an end of Gretna as Lord
Hardwicke’s had of the Fleet unions. It provided that at least one
of the parties to an irregular Scots marriage must be domiciled in
Scotland, or have resided there during the twenty-one days immediately
preceding the espousals; else were they altogether void. What an enemy
your modern law-giver is to the picturesque! And what an entertaining
place this world must once have been!




The Border Law

    The Border Country--Its Lays and Legends--The Wardens and Other
    Officers--Johnie Armstrong--Merrie Carlisle--Blackmail--The Border
    Chieftain and His Home--A Raid--“Hot-trod”--“To-names”--A Bill
    of Complaint--The Day of Truce--Business and Pleasure--“Double
    and Salffye”--Border Faith--Deadly Feud--The Story of Kinmont
    Willie--The Debateable Land--The Union of the Crowns and the End of
    Border Law.


_Leges marchiarum_, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and
lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and
Scots Borderers should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should
guard against the other’s deadly unceasing enmity. I propose to outline
these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were
enforced.

But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the
Solway--the extreme points of the dividing line between North and
South Britain--is but seventy miles in a crow’s flight. But trace its
windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half of
this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing
forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here,
was pushed back a little farther north there; and commissioners and
treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three
centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the
kingdoms met. If it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots’ character, and
prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland
proper, what must have been its effect on the Scots Borderer, ever in
the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt
the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled
than the Scots Borders: being the richer, they were the more liable
to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other
Englishmen; they were kept in hand by a strong central authority; they
had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now,
the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that
we take our ideas of Border life.

The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded
hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins
of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past,
however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads
are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can,
the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of
other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness, yet
we oft feel:

  He had himself laid hand on sword
  He who this rime did write!

The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional
stories help but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more,
and tell it better, than the dull records of the annalists. We know who
these men really were--a strong, resolute race, passionate and proud,
rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless
devotion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to
the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes
across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasion to a certain
rude eloquence; and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome.
The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen;
and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the
Highlands to the north and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder
at the burden _it_ had to endure. For a race, whatever its good
qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as
well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots,
were girded at as “always riding”; and they were not particular as to
whom they rode against. Nay, both governments suspected the Borderers
of an inexplicable tenderness for their neighbours. When they took part
in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspicious
lack of heart. At best they were apt to look at war from their own
point of view, and fight for mere prisoners or plunder.

To meet such conditions the Border Laws were evolved. They were
administered in chief by special officers called Wardens. Either Border
was portioned out into three Marches: the East, the Middle, and the
West (the Lordship of Liddesdale was included in the Scots Middle
March, but sometimes it had a special Keeper of almost equal dignity
with a Warden.) Each of the three Scots Wardens had a hundred pounds of
yearly fee; he could appoint deputies, captains of strongholds, clerks,
sergeants, and dempsters; he could call out the full force of his
district to invade or beat back invasion; he represented the Sovereign,
and was responsible for crimes. He must keep the Border clans in order
by securing as hostages several of their most conspicuous sons, and
either these were quartered on nobles on the other side of the Firth,
or they were held in safer keeping in the king’s castles. He also held
Justice Courts for the trial of Scots subjects accused of offences
against the laws of their own country. He was commonly a great noble
of the district, his office in early times being often hereditary;
and, as such noble, he had power of life and death, so that the need
for holding special courts was little felt. A pointed Scots anecdote
pictures an angry Highlander “banning” the Lords of Session as “kinless
loons,” because, though some were relatives, they had decided a case
against him. These Wardens were _not_ “kinless loons,” and they often
used their office to favour a friend or depress a foe. On small pretext
they put their enemies “to the horn,” as the process of outlawry (by
trumpet blast) was called. True, the indifference with which those
enemies “went to the horn” would scandalise the legal pedants.

Sometimes a superior officer, called “Lieutenant,” was sent to the
Borders; the Wardens were under him; he more fully represented the
royal power. Now and again the Sovereign himself made a progress,
administering a rough and ready justice, and so “dantoning the
thieves of the Borders, and making the rush bush keep the cow.” So
it was said of James V.’s famous raid in 1529. The chief incident
was the capture of Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the ruins of whose
picturesque tower at the Hollows still overlook the Esk. Gilnockie
came to meet his King with a great band of horsemen richly apparelled.
He was captain of Langholm Castle, and the ballad tells how he and
his companions exercised themselves in knightly sports on Langholm
Lee, whilst “The ladies lukit frae their loft windows. ‘God bring our
men well hame agen!’” the ladies said; and their apprehensions were
more than justified, for Johnie’s reception was not so cordial as he
expected. “What wants yon knave that a King should have?” asked James
in angry amaze, as he ordered the band to instant execution. Gilnockie
and company were presently strung up on some convenient yew-trees at
Carlenrig, though, in accordance with romantic precedent, one is said
to have escaped to tell the tale. Many of Johnie’s name, among them Ill
Will Armstrong, tersely described as “another stark thieff,” went to
their doom; but the act, however applauded at Edinburgh, was bitterly
condemned on the Borders. Gilnockie only plundered the English, it
was urged, and the King had caught him by a trick unworthy a Stuart.
The country folk loved to tell how the dule-trees faded away, and
they loved to point out the graves of the Armstrongs in the lonely
churchyard. But the stirring ballad preserves the name better than
all else. It unblushingly commends Gilnockie’s love of honesty, his
generosity, his patriotism, and directly accuses his Sovereign of
treachery, in which accusation there is perhaps some truth. Anyhow,
his execution was the violent act of a weak man, and had no permanent
effect.

The Wardens had twofold duties: first, that of defence against the
enemy; second, that of negotiation in times of peace with their
mighty opposites. Thus the Border laws were part police and part
international, and were administered in different courts. Offences of
the first class were speaking or conferring with Englishmen without
permission of the King or the Warden, and the warning Englishmen of the
Scots’ alertness in the matter of forays. In brief, aiding, abetting,
or in any way holding intercourse with the “auld enemy” was march
treason (to adopt a convenient English term).

In England the Wardens were finally chosen for their political and
military skill, not because of their territorial position. Now, the
Warden of the East Marches was commonly Governor and Castellan of
Berwick. The castle of Harbottell was allotted to the Warden of the
Middle Marches; whilst for the West, Carlisle, where again Governor
and Warden were often one, was the appointed place. Sometimes a Lord
warden-general was appointed, sometimes a Lieutenant, but the Wardens
were commonly independent. At the Warden courts Englishmen were
punished for march treason, a branch of which was furnishing the Scots
with articles of merchandise or war. And here I note that Carlisle
throve on this illegal traffic. At Carlisle Fair the Carlisle burgher
never asked the nationality of man or beast. The first got his money or
its equivalent; the second was instantly passed through the hands of
butcher and skinner. Though the countryside were wasted, the burghers
lay safe within their strong walls, and waxed fat on the spoils of
borderman and dalesman alike. Small wonder the city was “Merrie
Carlisle.” The law struck with as little force against blackmail, or
protection money, which it was an offence to pay to any person, Scots
or English. From this source, Gilnockie and others, coining the terror
of their name, drew great revenue. Another provision was against
marriage with a Scotswoman without the Warden’s consent, for in this
way traitors, or “half-marrows,” arose within the gate. Complete forms
are preserved of the procedure at those Warden courts. There were a
grand jury and an ordinary jury, and the Warden acted very much as a
judge of to-day. One or two technical terms I shall presently explain.
Here I but note that the criminal guilty of march treason was beheaded
“according to the customs of the marches.”

The international duties of the Wardens were those of conference with
each other, and the redressing of approved wrongs, which wrongs were
usually done in raids or forays. Of these I must now give some account.
The smaller Border chieftain dwelt in a peel tower, stuck on the edge
of a rock or at the break of a torrent. It was a rude structure with
a projecting battlement. A stair or ladder even held its two stories
together, and about it lay a barnkin--a space of some sixty feet
encompassed by a wall; the laird’s followers dwelling in huts hard
by. For small parties the tower was self-sufficient in defence, and
if it lay in the way of a hostile army, the laird was duly warned
by scouts or beacon fires, and withdrew to some fastness of rock or
marsh, carrying his few valuables, driving his live stock before him,
leaving the foeman nothing to burn and nothing to take away. With his
followers he lived on milk, meat, and barley, together with the spoils
of the forest and stream. The marchmen are reported temperate--no
doubt from necessity. Their kine, recruited by forays, were herded in
a secluded part of the glen, and when the herd waxed small, and the
laird was tired of hunting, and his women lusted after new ornament,
and old wounds were healed, and the retainers were growing rusty, then
it was time for a raid. Was the laird still inactive? In struck his
lady’s sharper wit, and the story goes that Wat Scott of Harden was
ever and anon served with a dish which, being uncovered, revealed a
pair of _polished_ spurs. Thus his wife, Mary Scott, the “Flower of
Yarrow”--a very practical person, despite her romantic name--urged him
to profitable rapine. Well: his riders were bidden to a trysting-place;
and hither, armed in jacks (which are leathern jerkins plated with
iron) and mounted on small but active and hardy horses, they repaired
at evenfall. The laird and some superior henchmen wore also sleeves
of mail and steel bonnets; all had long lances, swords, axes, and in
later times such rude firearms--serpentines, half-haggs, harquebusses,
currys, cullivers, and hand-guns are mentioned--as were to be had.
In the mirk night the reivers crossed the Border; and to do this
unseen was no easy matter. The whole line from Berwick to Carlisle was
patrolled by setters and searchers, watchers and overseers, having
sleuth-hounds to track the invader; also, many folk held lands by the
tenure of cornage, and by blowing horns must warn the land of coming
raids. Where the frontier line was a river the fords were carefully
guarded; those held unnecessary were staked up; narrow passes were
blocked in divers ways, so that chief element in Border craft was the
knowledge of paths and passes through moorland and moss, and of nooks
and coigns of security deep in the mountain glens.

Our party crosses in safety and makes to one of those hidden spots,
as near as may be to the scene of action. Here it rests and refreshes
itself during the day, and next night it swoops down on its appointed
foray. The chief quest was ever cattle, which were eatable and
portable. But your moss-trooper was not particular. He took everything
inside and outside house and byre. Many lists are preserved of
things lifted, whereof one notes a shroud and children’s clothes. A
sleuth-hound was a choice prize. Possibly its abduction touched the
Borderer’s sense of humour. Scott of Harden, escaping from a raid, with
“a bow of kye and a bassen’d (brindled) bull,” passed a trim haystack.
He sighed as he thought of the lack of fodder in his own glen. “Had
ye but four feet ye should not stand lang there,” he muttered as he
hurried onwards. Not to him, not to any rider was it given to tarry by
the way, for the dalesmen were not the folk to sit down under outrage.
The warder, as he looked from the “Scots gate” of Carlisle castle, and
saw the red flame leaping forth into the night from burning homestead
or hamlet, was quick to warn the countryside that a reiving expedition
was afoot. Even though the prey were lifted unobserved, that only
caused a few hours’ delay, and soon a considerable body, carrying
a lighted piece of turf on a spear, as a sign, was instant on the
invader’s trace. This “following of the fraye” was called “hot-trod,”
and was done with hound and horn, and hue and cry. Certain privileges
attached to the “hot-trod.” If the offender was caught red-handed he
was executed; or, if thrift got the better of rage, he was held to
ransom. As early as 1276 a curious case is reported from Alnwick, of a
Scot attacking one Semanus, a hermit, and taking his clothes and one
penny! Being presently seized, the culprit was beheaded by Semanus in
person, who thus recovered his goods and took vengeance of his wrong. A
later legend illustrates the more than summary justice that was done.
The Warden’s officers having taken a body of prisoners, asked my Lord
his pleasure. His Lordship’s mind was “ta’en up wi’ affairs o’ the
state,” and he hastily wished the whole set hanged for their untimely
intrusion. Presently he was horrified to find that his imprecations
had been taken as literal commands, and literally obeyed. Even if
the reivers gained their own border, the law of “hot-trod” permitted
pursuit within six days of the offence. The pursuer, however, must
summon some reputable man of the district entered to witness his
proceedings. Nay, the inhabitants generally must assist him--at least,
the law said so.

But if all failed, the _Leges Marchiarum_ had still elaborate
provisions to meet his case. He had a shrewd guess who were his
assailants. The more noted moss-troopers were “kenspeckle folk.”
The very fact that so many had the same surname caused them to be
distinguished by what were called “to-names,” based on some physical
or moral characteristic, which even to-day photographs the man for us.
Such were Eddie Great-legs, Jock Half-lugs, Red-neb Hob, Little Jock
Elliott, Wynkyng Wyll, Wry-crag, Ill Wild Will, Evil Willie, David
the Leddy, Hob the King; or some event in a man’s history provided
a “to-name.” Ill Drooned Geordy, you fancy, had barely escaped a
righteous doom, and Archie Fire-the-Braes was sure a swashbuckler of
the first magnitude. Others derived from their father’s name.

  The Lairdis Jok
  All with him takis.

Thus, Sir Thomas Maitland, who has preserved some of these appellations
in his _Complainte Aganis the Thievis of Liddisdail_, apparently the
only weapon he--though Scots Chancellor--could use against them.
Other names, the chroniclers affirm, are more expressive still; but
modern prudery forbids their recovery. They were good enough headmark,
whatever their quality; and a harried household had but to hear one
shouted in or after the harrying to know who the harriers were. The
slogan, or war-cry, of the clan would rap out in the excitement, and
there again he knew his men. The cross of St. Andrew showed them to be
Scots, the cross of St. George affirmed them English. A letter sewn
in a cap, a kerchief round the arm, were patent identification. The
chieftain’s banner was borne now and again, even in a daylight foray--a
mode affected by the more daring spirits.

Divining in some sort his spoiler, the aggrieved and plundered
sought legal redress. Now the Laws of the Marches, agreed on by royal
commissioners from the two kingdoms, regulated intercourse from early
times. Thus as early as 1249, eleven knights of Northumberland, and
as many from the Scots Border, drew up a rough code: for the recovery
of debts, the surrender of fugitive bondsmen, and the trial by combat
of weightier matters in dispute. All Scotsmen, save the king and the
bishops of St. Andrews and Dunkeld, accused of having committed a
crime in England, must fight their accuser at certain fixed places on
the Marches; and there were corresponding provisions when the accused
was an Englishman. What seems a form of the _judicium Dei_ appears in
another provision. An animal said to be stolen, being brought to the
Tweed or the Esk, where either formed the boundary, was driven into
the water. If the beast sank the defendant paid. If it swam to the
farther shore, the claimant had him as his own. If it scrambled back
to the bank whence it started, the accused might (perchance) retain
it with a clear conscience. But as to this event the record is silent;
and, indeed, the whole business lacks intelligibility. The combats,
however, were many, and were much denounced by the clergy, who had to
provide a champion, and were heavily mulcted if he lost. The priest
suffered no more than the people; but he could better voice his wrongs.
All such things were obviously adaptations of the trial by ordeal, or
by combat, and the treason duel of chivalry, to the rough life of the
Border. Again, the matter was settled, even in late times, by the oath
of the accused. The prisoner was sworn:--“By Heaven above you, Hell
beneath you, by your part of Paradise, by all that God made in six
days and seven nights, and by God Himself,” that he was innocent. In a
superstitious age this might have some effect; and there was ever the
fear of being branded as perjured. But it can have been used only when
there was no proof, or when the doubt was very grave: when the issue,
that is, seemed as the cutting of a knot, the loosing whereof passed
man’s wit.

In the century preceding the Union of the Crowns, the international
code was very highly developed, and the procedure was strictly defined.
As England was the larger nation, and as its law was in a more highly
developed and more firm and settled state, its methods were followed
on the whole. The injured party sent a bill of complaint to his own
Warden; and the bill, even as put into official form, was simplicity
itself. It said that A. complained upon B. for that--and then followed
a list of the stolen goods, or the wrongs done. It was verified by
the complainant’s oath, and thereafter sent to the opposite Warden,
whose duty was to arrest the accused or at least to give him notice to
attend on the next Day of Truce. [One famous fray (June 17, 1575) is
commemorated in _The Raid of the Reidswire_, a ballad setting forth
many features of a Day of Truce.] The Wardens agreed on the Day, and
the place was usually in the northern kingdom, where most of the
defendants lived. The meeting was proclaimed in all the market towns
on either side. The parties, each accompanied by troops of friends,
came in; and a messenger from the English side demanded that assurance
should be kept till sunrise the following day. This was granted by the
Scots, who proceeded to send a similar message, and were presently
secured by a similar assurance. Then each Warden held up his hand as a
sign of faith, and made proclamation of the Day to his own side (the
evident purpose of this elaborate ritual was to keep North and South
from flying, on sight, at each other’s throats). The English Warden
now came to his Scots brother, whom he saluted and embraced; and the
business of the Day of Truce (or Diet, or Day Marche, or Warden Court,
as it was variously called) began. That business was commerce, and
pleasure, as well as law. Merchants come with their wares; booths
were run up; a brisk trade ran in articles tempting to the savage
eye. Both sides were ready for the moment to forget their enmities.
If they could not fight, they could play, and football was ever your
Borderers’ favourite pastime (from the desperate mauls which mark that
exhilarating sport as practised along the Border line, one fancies
that the “auld riding bluid” still stirs in the veins of the players).
Gambling, too, was a popular excitement. There was much of feasting
and drinking, and sure some Border Homer, poor and old and blind, even
as him of Chios, was there to charm and melt his rude hearers with the
storied loves and wars of other days. The conclave fairly hummed with
pleasure and excitement. Yet with such inflammable material, do you
wonder that the meeting ended now and again in most admired disorder?

For our bill of complaint, it might be tried in more than one way.
It might be by “the honour of the Warden,” who often had knowledge,
personal or acquired, of the case, and felt competent to decide the
matter off-hand. On his first appearance he had taken an oath (yearly
renewed) in presence of the opposite Warden and the whole assemblage
to do justice, and he now officially “fyled” or “cleared the bill”
(as the technical phrase ran) by writing on it the words “foull (or
‘clear’), as I am verily persuaded upon my conscience and honour”--a
deliverance after the method wherein individual peers give their
voice at a trial of one of their order. This did not of necessity end
the matter, for the complainant could present a new bill and get the
verdict of a jury thereon, which also was the proper tribunal where the
Warden declined to interfere. It was thus chosen: The English Warden
named and swore in six Scots, the Scots Warden did the like to six
Englishmen. The oath ran in these terms:--“Yea shall cleare noe bill
worthie to be fild, yea shall file no bill worthie to be cleared,” and
so forth. Warden sergeants were appointed who led the jury to a retired
place; the bills were presented; and the jurymen fell to work. It would
seem that they did so in two sections, each considering complaints
against its own nationality. If the bill was “fyled,” the word “foull”
was written upon it (of course, a verdict of guilty); but how to
get such a verdict under such conditions? The assize had more than a
fellow-feeling for the culprit: like the jury in Aytoun’s story, they
might think that Flodden (then no distant memory) was not yet avenged.
There were divers expedients to this end. Commissioners were sometimes
appointed by the two crowns to solve a difficulty a Warden Court had
failed to adjust. Again, it was strangely provided that “If the accused
be not quitt by the oathe of the assize it is a conviction.” One very
stubborn jury (_temp._ 1596) sat for a day, a night, and a day on end,
“almost to its undoeinge.” The Warden, enraged at such conduct and yet
fearing for the men’s lives, needs must discharge them. I ought to
mention an alleged third mode of trial by vower, who, says Sir Walter
Scott, was an umpire to whom the dispute was referred. Rather was he a
witness of the accused’s own nation. Some held such evidence essential
to conviction; if honest, it was practically conclusive.

Well! Suppose the case too clear and the man too friendless, and the
jury “fyled” the bill. If the offence were capital, the prisoner was
kept in safe custody, and was hanged or beheaded as soon as possible.
But most affairs were not capital. Thus the Border Law forbad hunting
in the other kingdom without the express leave of the owner of the
soil. Just such an unlicensed hunting is the theme of _Chevy Chase_.
Thus:--

  The Percy owt of Northumberland,
    And a vow to God mayd he,
  That he wolde hunte in the mountayns
    Off Cheviot within dayes thre,
  In the mauger of doughty Douglas,
    And all that ever with him be.

Douglas took a summary mode of redress where a later and tamer owner
had lodged his bill. In a common case of theft, if the offender were
not present (the jury would seem to have tried cases in absence), the
Warden must produce him at the next Day of Truce. Indeed, whilst the
jury was deliberating, the officials were going over the bills “filed”
on the last Day, and handing over each culprit to the opposite Warden;
or sureties were given for him; or the Warden delivered his servant as
pledge. If the pledge died, the body was carried to the next Warden
Court.

The guilty party, being delivered up, must make restitution within
forty days or suffer death, whilst aggravated cases of “lifting”
were declared capital. In practice a man taken in fight or otherwise
was rarely put to death. Captive and captor amicably discussed the
question of ransom. That fixed, the captive was allowed to raise it;
if he failed he honourably surrendered. The amount of restitution
was the “Double and Salffye,” to wit, three times the value of the
original goods, two parts being recompense, and the third costs or
expenses. Need I say that this triple return was too much for Border
honesty? Sham claims were made, and these, for that they obliged the
Wardens “to speire and search for the thing that never was done,” were
rightly deemed a great nuisance. As the bills were sworn to, each
false charge involved perjury; and in 1553 it was provided that the
rascal claimants should be delivered over to the tender mercies of the
opposite Warden. Moreover, a genuine bill might be grossly exaggerated
(are claims against insurance and railway companies always urged with
accuracy of detail?). If it were disputed, the value was determined by
a mixed jury of Borderers.

I have had occasion to refer to Border faith. In 1569 the Earl of
Northumberland was implicated in a rising against Elizabeth. Fleeing
north, he took refuge with an Armstrong, Hector of Harelaw, who
sold him to the Regent Murray. Harelaw’s name became a byword and a
reproach. He died despised and neglected; and “to take Hector’s cloak”
was an imputation of treachery years after the original story had
faded. Thus, in Marchland the deadliest insult against a man was to
say that he had broken faith. The insult was given in a very formal
and deliberate manner, called a Baugle. The aggrieved party procured
the glove or picture of the traitor, and whenever there was a meeting
(a Day of Trace was too favourable an opportunity to be neglected) he
gave notice of the breach of faith to friend and foe, with blast of
the horn and loud cries. The man insulted must give him the lie in his
throat, and a deadly combat ensued. The Laws of the Marches attempted
to substitute the remedy by bill, that the matter might not “goe to the
extremyte of a baughle,” or where that was impossible, to fix rules for
the thing itself. Or, the Wardens were advised to attend, with less
than a hundred of retinue, to prevent “Brawling, buklinge, quarrelinge,
and bloodshed.” Such things were a fruitful source of what a Scots
Act termed “the heathenish and barbarous custom of Deadly Feud.” When
one slew his fellow under unfair conditions, the game of revenge
went see-sawing on for generations. The Border legislators had many
ingenious devices to quench such strife. A Warden might order a man
complained of to sign in solemn form a renunciation of his feud; and if
he refused, he was delivered to the opposite Warden till he consented.
In pre-Reformation days the church did something by enjoining prayer
and pilgrimage. A sum of money (Assythement) now and again settled
old scores; or there might be a treaty of peace cemented by marriage.
Sometimes, again, there was a fight by permission of the Sovereign.
(_Cf._ the parallel case of the clan-duel in the _Fair Maid of Perth_.)
Still, prearranged single combats, duels in fact, were frequent on the
Border. Turner, or Turnie Holme, at the junction of the Kirshope and
Liddel, was a favourite spot for them.

And now business and pleasure alike are ended, and the day (fraught
with anxiety to official minds) is waning fast. Proclamation is made
that the multitude may know the matters transacted. Then it is declared
that the Lord Wardens of England and Scotland, and Scotland and England
(what tender care for each other’s susceptibilities!) appoint the
next Day of Truce, which ought not to be more than forty days hence,
at such and such a place. Then, with solemn salutations and ponderous
interchange of courtesy, each party turns homeward. As noted, the Truce
lasted till the next sunrise. As the nations were at peace (else had
there been no meeting), this recognised the fact that the Borders
were always, more or less, in a state of trouble. Also it prevented
people from violently righting themselves forthwith. A curious case in
1596, where this condition was broken, gave rise to a Border foray of
the most exciting kind, commemorated in the famous ballad of _Kinmont
Willie_. A Day of Truce had been held on the Kershope Burn, and at its
conclusion Willie Armstrong of Kinmont, a noted Scots freebooter, rode
slowly off, with a few companions. Some taunt, or maybe the mere sight
of one who had done them so much wrong, was too much for the English
party, and Kinmont was speedily laid by the heels in Carlisle Castle.
Buccleuch was Keeper of Liddisdale. He had not been present at the Day
of Truce; but when they told him that Kinmont had been seized “between
the hours of night and day,” he expressed his anger in no uncertain
terms:

  He has ta’en the table wi’ his hand,
  He garr’d the red wine spring on hie.

       *       *       *       *

  And have they ta’en him, Kinmont Willie,
  Against the truce of Border tide?
  And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
  Is keeper here on the Scottish side?

Negociations failing to procure redress, Buccleuch determined to rescue
Kinmont himself. In the darkness of a stormy night he and his men stole
up to Carlisle, broke the citadel, rescued Kinmont, and carried him off
in safety, whilst the English lawyers were raising ingenious technical
justifications (you can read them at length in the collection of Border
Papers) of the capture. Those same papers show that the ballad gives
the main features of the rescue with surprising accuracy. But I cannot
linger over its cheerful numbers. The event might once have provoked
a war, but the shadow of the Union was already cast. James would do
nothing to spoil the splendid prize almost within his grasp, and
Elizabeth’s statesmen were not like to quarrel with their future master.

Half a century before the consummation one great cause of discord had
been removed. From the junction of the Liddel and Esk to the Solway
was known as the Debateable Land, a sort of No-Man’s Land, left in
doubt from the time of Bruce. Both nations pastured on it from sunrise
to sunset, but in the night any beasts left grazing were lawful prey
to the first comer. Enclosures or houses on it could be destroyed or
burned without remedy. Apparently the idea was to make it a “buffer
State” between the two kingdoms. It was, however, a thorn in the flesh
to each, for the Bateables, as the in-dwellers were called, were
broken men, and withal the most desperate ruffians on the Border. In
1552 a joint Commission divided the Debateable Land between England
and Scotland. The Bateables were driven out, and a <DW18> was built as
boundary line. All the same, here was, for many years, the wildest in
the whole wild whirlpool; so that long after the Union, when somebody
told King James of a cow which, taken from England to Scotland, had
broken loose and got home of itself, the British Solomon was sceptical.
It gravelled him, he confessed, to imagine any four-footed thing
passing unlifted through the Debateable Land.

With the death of Elizabeth (1603) came the Union of the Crowns, and
the Scots riders felt their craft in danger, for they forthwith made
a desperate incursion into England, with some idea (it is thought) of
staying the event. But they were severely punished, and needs must
cower under the now all-powerful Crown. The appointment of effective
Wardens presently ceased. In 1606, by the Act 4 Jac. I., cap. 1, the
English Parliament repealed the anti-Scots laws, on condition that the
Scots Parliament reciprocated; and presently a kindred measure was
touched with the sceptre at Edinburgh. The administration of the Border
was left to the ordinary tribunals, and the _Leges Marchiarum_ vanished
to the Lumber Room.




The Serjeant-at-Law

    The Black Patch on the Wig--A King’s Serjeant--The Old English
    Law Courts--The Common Pleas--Queen’s Counsel--How Serjeants
    were Created--Their Feasts--Their Posies--Their Colts--Chaucer’s
    Serjeant-at-Law--The Coif--The Fall of the Order--Some Famous
    Serjeants.


You have no doubt, at some time or other, walked through the Royal
Courts of Justice and admired the Judges in their scarlet or other
bravery. One odd little detail may have caught your eye: a black patch
on the top differences the wig of the present (1898) Master of the
Rolls from those of his brethren. It signifies that the wearer is a
Serjeant-at-Law, and when he goes to return no more, with him will
probably vanish the Order of the Coif. Verily, it will be the “end
o’ an auld sang,” of a record stretching back to the beginning of
English jurisprudence, of an order whose passing had, at one time,
seemed as the passing of the law itself. Here in bare outline I set
forth its ancient and famous history. And, first, as to the name.
Under the feudal system land was held from the Crown upon various
tenures. Sometimes special services were required from the holders;
these were called Serjeants, and a tenure was said to be by Serjeanty.
Special services, though usually military, now and again had to do
with the administration of justice. A man enjoyed his plot because he
was coroner, keeper of the peace, summoner, or what not; and, over
and above the land, he had the fees of the office. A few offices,
chiefly legal, came to have no land attached--were only paid in fees.
Such a business was a Serjeanty in gross, or at large, as one might
say. Again, after the Conquest, whilst the records of our law courts
were in Latin, the spoken language was Norman-French--a fearful and
wondrous tongue that grew to be--“as ill an hearing in the mouth as
law-French,” says Milton scornfully--and indeed Babel had scarce
matched it. But from the first it must have been a sore vexation to
the thick-witted Saxon haled before the tribunal of his conquerors.
He needs must employ a _counter_, or man skilled in the _conter_, as
the pleadings were called. The business was a lucrative one, so the
Crown assumed the right of regulation and appointment. It was held for
a Serjeanty in gross, and its holders were _servientes regis ad legem_.
The word _regis_ was soon omitted except as regards those specially
retained for the royal service. The literal translation of the other
words is Serjeants-at-law, still the designation of the surviving
fellows of the order. The Serjeant-at-law was appointed, or, in form at
least, commanded to take office by writ under the Great Seal. He was
courteously addressed as “you,” whilst the sheriff was commonly plain
“thou” or “thee.” The King’s or Queen’s Serjeants were appointed by
letters patent; and though this official is extinct as the dodo, he is
mentioned after the Queen’s Attorney-General as the public prosecutor
in the proclamation still mumbled at the opening of courts like the Old
Bailey.

Now, in the early Norman period the _aula regis_, or Supreme Court,
was simply the King acting as judge with the assistance of his great
officers of state. In time there developed therefrom among much else
the three old common law courts; whereof the Common Pleas settled the
disputes of subjects, the King’s Bench, suits concerning the King
and the realm, the Exchequer, revenue matters. Though the last two
by means of quaint fictions afterwards acquired a share of private
litigation, yet such was more properly for the Court of Common Pleas.
It was peculiarly the Serjeants’ court, and for many centuries, up to
fifty years ago, they had the exclusive right of audience. Until the
Judicature Acts they were the body of men next to the judges, each
being addressed from the bench as “Brother,” and from them the judges
must be chosen, also until 1850 the assizes must be held before a judge
or a Serjeant of the coif.

A clause in Magna Charta provided that the Common Pleas should not
follow the King’s wanderings, but sit in a fixed place; this fixed
place came to be near the great door of the Hall at Westminster. With
the wind in the north the spot was cold and draughty, so after the
Restoration some daring innovator proposed “to let it (the Court) in
through the wall into a back room which they called the treasury.” Sir
Orlando Bridgeman, the Chief Justice, would on no account hear of this.
To move it an inch were flagrant violation of Magna Charta. Might not,
he darkly hinted, all its writs be thus rendered null and void? Was
legal pedantry ever carried further? In a later age the change was made
without comment, and in our own time the Common Pleas itself has gone
to the Lumber Room. No doubt this early localising of the court helped
to develop a special Bar. Other species of practitioners--barristers,
attorneys, solicitors--in time arose, and the appointment of Queen’s
Counsel, of whom Lord Bacon was the earliest, struck the first real
blow at the Order of the Coif; but the detail of such things is not
for this page. In later days every Serjeant was a more fully developed
banister, and then and now, as is well known, every barrister must
belong to one of the four Inns of Court--the two Temples, Gray’s Inn,
and Lincoln’s Inn to wit, whose history cannot be told here; suffice
it to say they were voluntary associations of lawyers, which gradually
acquired the right of calling to the Bar those who wished to practise.

Now, the method of appointment of Serjeants was as follows: The judges,
headed by the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, picked out certain
eminent barristers as worthy of the dignity, their names were given in
to the Lord Chancellor, and in due time each had his writ, whereof he
formally gave his Inn notice. His House entertained him at a public
breakfast, presented him with a gold or silver net purse with ten
guineas or so as a retaining fee, the chapel bell was tolled, and he
was solemnly rung out of the bounds. On the day of his call he was
harangued (often at preposterous length) by the Chief Justice of the
King’s Bench, he knelt down, and the white coif of the order was fitted
on his head; he went in procession to Westminster and “counted” in
a real action in the Court of Common Pleas. For centuries he did so
in law-French. Lord Hardwicke was the first Serjeant who “counted” in
English. The new-comer was admitted a member of Serjeants’ Inn, in
Chancery Lane, in ancient times called Farringdon Inn, whereof all
the members were Serjeants. Here they dined together on the first
and last days of term; their clerks also dined in hall, though at a
separate table--a survival, no doubt, from the days when the retainer
feasted, albeit “below the salt,” with his master. Dinner done and
the napery removed, the board of green cloth was constituted, and
under the presidency of the Chief Judge the business of the House was
transacted. There was a second Serjeants’ Inn in Fleet Street, but in
1758 its members joined the older institution in Chancery Lane. When
the Judicature Acts practically abolished the order, the Inn was sold
and its property divided among the members, a scandalous proceeding and
poor result of “the wisdom of an heep of lernede men”!

The Serjeant’s feast on his appointment was a magnificent affair,
_instar coronationis_, as Fortescue has it. In old times it lasted
seven days; one of the largest palaces in the metropolis was selected,
and kings and queens graced its quaint ceremonial. Stow chronicles one
such celebration at the call of eleven Serjeants, in 1531. There were
consumed “twenty-four great beefes, one hundred fat muttons, fifty-one
great veales, thirty-four porkes,” not to mention the swans, the
larkes, the “capons of Kent,” the “carcase of an ox from the shambles,”
and so forth. One fancies these solids were washed down by potations
proportionately long and deep. And there were other attractions and
other expenses. At the feast in October 1552, “a standing dish of wax
representing the Court of Common Pleas” was the admiration of the
guests; again, a year or two later, it is noted that each Serjeant was
attended by three gentlemen selected by him from among the members of
his own Inn to act as his sewer, his carver, and his cup-bearer. These
Gargantuan banquets must have proved a sore burden: they were cut down
to one day, and, on the union of the Inns in 1758, given up as unsuited
to the newer times.

One expense remained. Serjeants on their call must give gold rings to
the Sovereign, the Lord Chancellor, the judges, and many others. From
about the time of Elizabeth mottoes or “posies” were engraved thereon.
Sometimes each Serjeant had his own device, more commonly the whole
call adopted the same motto, which was usually a compliment to the
reigning monarch or an allusion to some public event. Thus, after the
Restoration the words ran: _Adeste Corolus Magnus_. With a good deal
of elision and twisting the Roman numerals for 1660 were extracted
from this, to the huge delight of the learned triflers. _Imperium et
libertas_ was the word for 1700, and _plus quam speravimus_ that of
1714, which was as neat as any. The rings were presented to the judges
by the Serjeant’s “colt,” as the barrister attendant on him through
the ceremony was called (probably from _colt_, an apprentice); he also
had a ring. In the ninth of Geo. II. the fourteen new Serjeants gave,
as of duty, 1409 rings, valued at £773. That call cost each Serjeant
nearly £200. This ring-giving continued to the end; another custom,
that of giving liveries to relatives and friends, was discontinued in
1759. In mediæval times the new Serjeants went in procession to St.
Paul’s, and worshipped at the shrine of Thomas à Becket; then to each
was allotted a pillar, so that his clients might know where to find
him. The Reformation put a summary end to the worship of St. Thomas,
but the formality of the pillar lingered on till Old St. Paul’s and Old
London blazed in the Great Fire of 1666.

The mediæval lawyer lives for us to-day in Chaucer’s famous picture:

  A Sergeant of Lawe, war and wys,
  That often hadde ben atte parvys,
  Ther was also, ful riche of excellence.
  Discret he was, and of great reverence:
  He semede such, his wordes weren so wise,
  Justice he was ful often in assise,
  By patente, and by pleyn commissioun;
  For his science, and for his heih renoun,
  Of fees and robes hadde he many oon.
  So gret a purchasour was nowher noon.
  Al was fee symple to him in effecte,
  His purchasyng mighte nought ben enfecte.
  Nowher so besy a man as he ther nas,
  And yit he seemede besier than he was.
  In termes hadde he caas and domes alle;
  That fro the tyme of kyng William were falle.
  Therto he couthe endite, and make a thing,
  Ther couthe no wight pynche at his writyng;
  And every statute couthe he pleyn by roote.
  He rood but hoomly in a medlé coote,
  Gird with a seynt of silk, with barres smale
  Of his array telle I no lenger tale.

How lifelike that touch of the fussy man, who “seemede besier than he
was”! But each line might serve as text for a long dissertation! The
old court hours were early: the judges sat from eight till eleven,
when your busy Serjeant would, after bolting his dinner, hie him to
his pillar where he would hear his client’s story, “and take notes
thereof upon his knee.” The parvys or pervyse of Paul’s--properly, only
the church door--had come to mean the nave of the cathedral, called
also “Paul’s Walk,” or “Duke Humphrey’s Walk,” from the supposed tomb
of Duke Humphrey that stood there. In Tudor times it was the great
lounge and common newsroom of London. Here the needy adventurer “dined
with Duke Humphrey,” as the quaint euphemism ran; here spies garnered
in popular opinion for the authorities. It was the very place for the
lawyer to meet his client, yet had he other resorts: the round of the
Temple Church and Westminster are noted as in use for consultations.

Chaucer’s Serjeant “rood but hoomly” because he was travelling; in
court he had a long priest-like robe, with a furred cape about his
shoulders and a scarlet hood. The gowns were various, and sometimes
parti-. Thus, in 1555 we find each new Serjeant possessed
of one robe of scarlet, one of violet, one of brown and blue, one
of mustard and murrey, with tabards (short sleeveless coats) of
cloths of the same colours. The cape was edged, first with lambskin,
afterwards with more precious stuff. In Langland’s _Vision of Piers
Plowman_ (1362) there is mention of this dress of the Serjeants, they
are jibed at for their love of fees and so forth, after a fashion
that is not yet extinct! But _the_ distinctive feature in the dress
was the coif, a close-fitting head covering made of white lawn or
silk. A badge of honour, it was worn on all professional occasions,
nor was it doffed even in the King’s presence. In monumental effigies
it is ever prominent. When a Serjeant resigned his dignity he was
formally discharged from the obligation of wearing it. To discuss its
exact origin were fruitless, yet one ingenious if mistaken conjecture
may be noticed. Our first lawyers were churchmen, but in 1217 these
were finally debarred from general practice in the courts. Many were
unwilling to abandon so lucrative a calling, but what about the
tonsure? “They were for decency and comeliness allowed to cover their
bald pates with a coif, which had been ever since retained.” Thus
the learned Serjeant Wynne in his tract on the antiquity and dignity
of the order (1765). In Tudor times, if not before, fashion required
the Serjeant to wear a small skull-cap of black silk or velvet on the
top of the coif. This is very clearly shown in one of Lord Coke’s
portraits. Under Charles II. lawyers, like other folk, began to wear
wigs, the more exalted they were the bigger their perukes. It was
wittily said that Bench and Bar went into mourning on Queen Anne’s
death, and so remained, since their present dress is that then adopted.
Serjeants were unwilling to lose sight of their coifs altogether,
and it was suggested on the wig by a round patch of black and white,
representing the white coif and the cap which had covered it. The limp
cap of black cloth known as the “black cap” which the judge assumes
when about to pass sentence of death was, it seems, put on to veil the
coif, and as a sign of sorrow. It was also carried in the hand when
attending divine service, and was possibly assumed in pre-Reformation
times when prayers were said for the dead.

A few words will tell of the fall of the order. As far back as 1755
Sir John Willis, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, proposed to throw
open that court as well as the office of judge to banisters who were
not Serjeants, but the suggestion came to nothing. In 1834, the Bill
for the establishment of a Central Criminal Court contained a clause
to open the Common Pleas; this was dropped, but the same object was
attained by a royal warrant, April 25, 1834. The legality of this was
soon questioned and, after solemn argument before the Privy Council,
it was declared invalid. In 1846 a statute (the 9 & 10 Vict. c. 54)
to the same effect settled the matter, and the Judicature Act of 1873
provided that no judge need in future be a Serjeant. On the dissolution
of Serjeants’ Inn its members were received back into the Houses whence
they had come.

As for centuries all the judges were Serjeants, the history of the
order is that of the Bench and Bar of England; yet some famous men
rose no higher, or for one reason or other became representative
members. Such a one was Sir John Maynard (1602-1690). In his last
years William III. commented on his venerable appearance: “He must
have outlived all the lawyers of his time.” “If your Highness had not
come I should have outlived the law itself,” was the old man’s happy
compliment. Pleading in Chancery one day, he remarked that he had
been counsel in the same case half a century before, he had steered a
middle course in those troubled times, but he had ever leant to the
side of freedom against King and Protector alike. His share in the
impeachment of Strafford procured him a jibe in Butler’s _Hudibras_,
yet it was said that all parties seemed willing to employ him, and
that he seemed willing to be employed by all. Jeffreys, who usually
deferred to him, once blustered out, “You are so old as to forget
your law, Brother Maynard.” “True, Sir George, I have forgotton more
law than ever you knew,” was the crushing retort. Macaulay has justly
praised his conduct at the Revolution for that he urged his party
to disregard legal technicalities and adopt new methods for new and
unheard-of circumstances. Edmund Plowden (1518-1585) deserves at least
equally high praise. He was so determined a student that “for three
years he went not once out of the Temple.” He is said to have refused
the Chancellorship offered him by Elizabeth as he would not desert
the old faith. He was attacked again and again for nonconformity,
but his profound knowledge of legal technicalities enabled him on
each occasion to escape the net spread for him. He was an Englishman
loyal to the core, and Catholic as he was opposed in 1555 the violent
proceedings of Queen Mary’s Parliament. The Attorney-General filed a
bill against him for contempt, but “Mr. Plowden traversed fully, and
the matter was never decided.” “A traverse full of pregnancy,” is Lord
Coke’s enthusiastic comment. On his death in 1584 they buried him in
that Temple Church whose soil must have seemed twice sacred to this
oracle of the law. An alabaster monument whereon his effigy reposes
remains to this day. A less distinguished contemporary was William
Bendloes (1516-1584), “Old Bendloes,” men called him. A quaint legend
reports him the only Serjeant at the Common Pleas bar in the first
year of Elizabeth’s reign. Whether there was no business, or merely
half-guinea motions of course, or the one man argued on both sides, or
whether the whole story be a fabrication, ’tis scarce worth while to
inquire.

I pass to more modern times. William Davy was made Serjeant-at-law in
1754. His wit combats with Lord Mansfield are still remembered. His
lordship was credited with a desire to sit on Good Friday; our Serjeant
hinted that he would be the first judge that had done so since Pontius
Pilate! Mansfield scouted one of Davy’s legal propositions. “If that be
law I must burn all my books.” “Better read them first,” was the quiet
retort. In recent days two of the best known Serjeants were Parry and
Ballantine, the first a profound lawyer, the second a great advocate,
but both are vanished from the scene.


  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
  London & Edinburgh




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


    Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

    Superscripted text is preceded with a carat character: behav^d.

    Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

    Inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been
    standardized.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Law's Lumber Room (Second Series), by 
Francis Watt

*** 