A HIGHWAY MURDER
It was on Thursday, 15th June 1786, that two sailors, paid off from H.M.S. Sampson, at Plymouth, and walking up to London, came to this spot. Their names were Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, and John Shepherd. Near the ‘Woodyates Inn’ they were overtaken by a thunderstorm, in which Matcham startled his companion by showing extraordinary marks of horror and distraction, running about, falling on his knees, and imploring mercy of some invisible enemy. To his companion’s questions he answered that he saw several strange and dismal spectres, particularly one in the shape of a female, towards which he advanced, when it instantly sank into the earth, and a large stone rose up in its place. Other large stones also rolled upon the ground before him, and came dashing against his feet. He confessed to Shepherd that, about seven years previously, he had enlisted as a soldier at Huntingdon, and shortly afterwards was sent out from that town in company with a drummer-boy, seventeen years of age, named Jones, son of a sergeant in the regiment, who was in charge of some money to be paid away. They quarrelled because the lad refused to return and drink at a public-house on the Great North Road which they had just passed, four miles from Huntingdon. Matcham knocked him down, cut his throat, and taking the money (six guineas) made off to London, leaving the body by the roadside. He now declared that, with this exception, he had never in his life broken the law, and that, before the moment of committing this crime, he had not the least design of injuring the deceased, who had given him no other provocation than ill-language. But from that hour he had been a stranger to peace of mind; his crime was always present to his imagination, and existence seemed at times an insupportable burden. He begged his companion to deliver him into the hands of Justice in the next town they should reach. That was Salisbury. He was imprisoned there, brought to trial, found guilty, and hanged.
Barham in his legend of the Dead Drummer has taken many liberties with the facts of the case, both as regards place and names, and makes the scene of the murderer’s terror identical with the site of the crime, which he (for purely literary purposes) places on Salisbury Plain, instead of the Great North Road, between Buckden and Alconbury.
XXXIV
Three more inns were situated beside the road between this point and Blandford in the old days. Of them, two, the ‘Thorney Down Inn,’ and the ‘Thickthorn Inn’ (romantic and shuddery names!), have disappeared, while the remaining one,—the ‘Cashmoor Inn’—formerly situated between the other two, ekes out a much less important existence than of old, as a wayside ‘public.’
Then comes a village—the first one since Coombe Bissett was passed, fifteen miles behind, and so more than usually welcome. A pretty village, too, Tarrant Hinton by name, lying in a hollow, with its little
CRANBORNE CHASE
