That the highwaymen and the murderers were not always dissuaded from their crimes by the prospect of this post-mortem indignity is of course to be readily supposed. There was always the chance of their not being discovered. Thus, although mail-robberies were probably much fewer than they would have been, except for the gibbeting order, they still were a feature of the highwaymen's enterprises: and the midnight roads continued to be awful with pendant bodies, creaking in the wind in their rusted irons.
It is not difficult to mentally reconstruct those times and those wayside incidents, and I can imagine the solitary highwayman proceeding to his shy business. There comes a horseman along the road; he can be heard half a mile away, in the hush of the night when, with the setting of the sun, the cattle have ceased lowing and a distant church clock alone helps to break the stillness. He is in no hurry, this belated cavalier, for the click-clock of his horse's hoofs is measured and he is long in passing.
He is gone, pacing slowly up the hill to where the great road goes by the end of the lane, and as he goes we hear him, under his breath, cursing the rising moon for a false jade. By favour of her light we have seen him as he goes, with a crape mask over his face and pistols in his holsters; and recognise him as Hotposset Dick, the highwayman, whose nickname comes from his fondness for mulled port. They say he always has a tankard for his mare as well as for himself when starting out to speak with the mail at Five-ways Cross.
Five-ways Cross is not a cheerful place for Dick just now, and his mulled port is useful for other purposes than keeping out the cold. It is a spot which most people would find lonely, but Dick has company up there; company of a silent kind, which is apt rather to get on the nerves, unless a man is well primed. It is a friend of Dick's, who used to go shares with him in the risks of robbing on the highway and in the profits of their trade. He was caught ignominiously, when carrying too much liquor; hanged, and gibbeted at the Cross afterwards. There he swings by the roadside in his cage, in a contemplative attitude, as though pondering on the mysteries of life and death. Six months' hanging there has not improved either his manly beauty or his clothes, and although the spot is generally shunned by the villagers, some one, for purposes of evil sorcery, has made away with one of the dead man's hands and most of his hair, to make a Hand of Glory.
"THERE HE SWINGS BY THE ROADSIDE, IN HIS CAGE, IN A CONTEMPLATIVE ATTITUDE, AS THOUGH PONDERING ON THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH."
A complete set of gibbet irons is nowadays a somewhat rare and curious object. Their pattern varied according to local taste and fancy. There exists a set in the museum at Warrington, Lancashire, which enclosed the body of Edward Miles, who was executed in 1788 for robbing the mail and for murdering the postboy. He was gibbeted near the Twystes, on the road to Manchester, and the iron frame in which he swung for years was buried at the foot of the gibbet-post. When it was found, in 1845, it had become an antiquity bearing upon the obsolete customs of our forefathers, and was carefully preserved. The shape of it quite clearly indicates the outline of a man's body, and there is even a kind of ghastly smartness about the framework that suggests a military bearing, which must have made the awful object a terribly dramatic sight.
