When one reads that “the body of the malefactor was the same afternoon buried within the precincts of the gaol,” the natural inference is that there is a graveyard, that there is a spot at the rear of the chapel, very likely, set apart for the interment of those who are sacrificed to the law’s just vengeance, and that, though the unhallowed hillocks are devoid of head or footstone, there is a registry kept, by which the authorities can tell whose disgraced remains they cover. This, however, is by no means the system adopted.
The guide, unlocking a door, discovers a narrow paved alley, between two very tall, rough-hewn walls, which are adorned with whitewash. The alley is, perhaps, five-and-twenty yards long, and not so wide but that two men joining hands could easily touch the sides of it, and at the end there is a grated gate.
“This,” remarks the civil warder, “is where we bury ’em,” and you naturally conclude that he alludes to a space beyond the gate, and that he is about to traverse the alley, and open it.
Instead of this, barely has he stepped over the threshold than he points to the letter “S,” dimly visible on the wall’s surface, and, says he—
“Slitwizen, who was hanged for murdering his wife and burning her body,” and before your breath, suspended by the startling announcement, is restored to you, he lays his forefinger on another letter a few inches off.
“Ketchcalf, who cut the throat of his fellow-servant; Brambleby, who split his father’s skull with a garden spade; Greenacre, who murdered Hannah Brown and afterwards cut up her body,” and so as he keeps shifting barely a foot at a time along the face of the whitened wall, he goes on adding to the horrible list, while the ghastly fact dawns on you that every letter denotes a body cut down from the gallows, and that the pavement you are walking on is bedded in the remains of who shall say how many male and female murderers?
We are comparatively moderate in modern times in the use of the hempen cord as a remedy against man-slaying, but this was nearly a generation since, when business was exceedingly brisk in that line, and a hanging was looked for in the Old Bailey on a Monday almost as much as a matter of course as the cattle-market in Smithfield on a Friday.
Then, as now, the dreadful little lane between the high walls was the only place of sepulchre for those who passed out to death through the debtors’ door.
The very paving-stones bear witness to the many times they have been roughly forced up by unskilled hands that a hole may be dug for the reception of the poor coffined wretches who wear quicklime for a shroud.
There is not a whole paving-stone the length of the alley, and they are patched and cobbled and mended with dabs of mortar in the most unhandsome way.