SNOOKS ADDRESSING THE CROWD AT HIS EXECUTION.
The horse was then whipped up, the cart drawn away from beneath the gallows-tree, and Robert Snooks had presently paid the harsh penalty of his crime. He had behaved with remarkable courage, and, espying an acquaintance in the crowd, offered him his watch if he would promise to see that his body received Christian burial. But the man, unwilling to be recognised as a friend of the criminal, made no response, and Snooks's body was buried at the foot of the gallows. A hole was dug there, and a truss of straw divided. Half was flung in first; the body upon that, and the second half on top. The hangman had half-stripped the body, declaring the clothes to be his perquisite, and would have entirely stripped it, had not the High Constable interfered, insisting that some regard should be had to decency.
A slow-moving feeling of compassion for the unhappy wretch took possession of some of the people of Hemel Hempstead, who on the following day procured a coffin, reopened the grave, and, placing the body in the coffin, thus gave it some semblance of civilised interment; but, those being the times of the body-snatchers, doubts have been expressed of the body being really there. It is thought that the body-snatchers may afterwards have visited the lonely spot and again resurrected it.
Two rough pieces of the local "plum-pudding stone" were afterwards placed on the grave, and remained until recent years.
Boxmoor is not now the lonely place it was. The traveller who seeks Snooks's grave may find it by continuing northward from Apsley End, passing under the railway bridges, and coming to a little roadside inn called the "Friend at Hand." Opposite this, on the right-hand side of the road, and between this road and the railway embankment runs a long narrow strip of what looks like meadow land, enclosed by an iron fence, This is really a portion of Boxmoor. At a point, a hundred and fifty yards past the inn, look out sharply for a clump of five young horse-chestnut trees growing on the moor. Close by them is a barren space of reddish earth, with a grassy mound, a piece of conglomerate, or "pudding-stone," and a newer stone inscribed "Robert Snooks, 11 March, 1802." This has been added since 1905, and duly keeps the spot in mind.
SNOOKS'S GRAVE.