MILES'S IRONS.
In the same neighbourhood in 1796 James Price and Thomas Brown were gibbeted together on Trafford Green, three miles from Chester, for robbing the postboy of the mails; and a pamphlet recounting their trial and execution goes so far as to include a map of the road, and a neat little view of the double gibbet, with Messrs. Price and Brown dangling from it.
The execution of the two brothers, Robert and William Drewett, in 1799, for robbing the Portsmouth mail near Midhurst, was a late example of Post-Office ferocity, and is saddened by the tradition that the younger prisoner was innocent, and that he refused to clear himself because by so doing he would incriminate his father. The bodies were gibbeted on North Heath Common.
The last person to be gibbeted in England was Cook, who had committed a peculiarly atrocious murder at Leicester [4] in 1832. Two years later, the practice was abolished by statute.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ROADS OUT OF LONDON
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say which road out of London was the most infested with highwaymen, in all these centuries. Where all were extremely dangerous for honest men, the bad eminence of any particular one is disputable. All the great highways were bordered by lonely wastes and commons until well on into the nineteenth century, and it is not saying too much to declare that the era of the highwaymen did not really end until that of railways had begun. Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, might see fit to declare that the age of the highwaymen was done, and that the age of cheats had succeeded, but he was a little too sanguine, or too despondent, whichever way you feel inclined to look at it. To take Wiltshire alone: one man was hanged at Fisherton gaol, Salisbury, in 1806, for highway robbery, one in 1816, two in 1817, and two in 1824; while in 1839, when the law had become less ferocious, three others were each sentenced to fifteen years' transportation for a most determined highway robbery at Gore Cross, on Salisbury Plain, on the evening of October 21st, in that year.