Finally, an accomplished Northamptonshire antiquary[97] informs us that many years ago he came to a lone hill at Elsdon, near Morpeth, in Northumberland, and found a gibbet with a wooden head hanging from it; this still exists. It seems that the murderer, whose crime it recorded, William Winter, who slew Margaret Crozier, in 1791, sat down to his lunch in a sheep-fold, and a curious shepherd-boy abstractedly counted the nails in his boots, and noticed his peculiar knife, and this led to his apprehension. The wooden head is a memorial of the savage past, a relic of “the good old times,” which we may truly rejoice to think have passed away for ever.
We have now dealt with some of the changeless passions in what the immortal Castaway calls “that strange chequer-work of Providence, the life of man.” We have traversed the gory path of dishonour from end to end, at times with wide steps, a way often obscure, and ever slippery with blood. It has not been necessary to go to mendacious chroniclers, or scandalous diaries, for this story of man’s high nature in some of its degradations, for we have, verily, as in the “Visions of Mirza,”[98] essayed to cross the bridge over the Vale of Misery; we have “unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies.”[99]
It has been impossible to treat of such a ghastly subject—of which the horrors seem to burn themselves into the mind—without a certain amount of ghastliness; indeed, without the plea of attempting to throw a ray of light into some of these dark corners of history, we should almost have flinched from bringing forward these melancholy topics, making sensibility shudder, and which our readers may, perchance, find it a pleasure to forget. And in imagination we already hear the cry—
“Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.”[100]
THE END.
[Note.]—Any notice of Gibbets in England would be incomplete without a reference to the Halifax Gibbet. This instrument of speedy but rough justice resembles the Guillotine. It remained in use until 1650, and records exist showing how numerous were the sufferers under its swift blade. The Earl of Morton, passing through Halifax about the middle of the sixteenth century, witnessed an execution, and is said to have been so much pleased with it that he had a similar machine made for Scotland, where he was Regent. It long remained unused under the name of “The Maiden.” But on June 3, 1587, the Regent was himself executed by it. Thus, as we have it in Hudibras, he “made a rod for his own breech.” The Maiden is now preserved in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, at Edinburgh.—See “Halifax and its Gibbet Law,” &c., 1756.
