Beyond the village of Islington lay the open road again, and travellers still, as they came to Ring Cross, spoke fearfully of the gibbet that had stood there, and hoped the memory of such things had not died out, nor ceased to be a warning to malefactors.
ISLINGTON GREEN, 1825.
Ring Cross has long since disappeared from the map. It stood, according to such careful cartographers as John Rocque and his coadjutors in 1746, at a point three and a half miles from London, now to be identified with the junction of the Holloway Road and the Benwell and Hornsey Roads, which then, under the fearful name of “Devil’s Lane,” led to the remote hamlet of Crouch End.
SCENES OF DREAD
The neighbourhood was of ill omen. There many a tattered body, slowly disintegrating, had hung in chains; most notable among them that of John Price, the hangman, who on May 31st, 1718, was himself hanged for robbing and murdering one Elizabeth White in Bunhill Fields, his body being afterwards suspended here. The horror of it was revived in 1827, when a skeleton with the gibbet-irons was found at “Catherine Street, near the main road, Holloway”; the gibbet and the remains being afterwards exhibited at the “Coach and Horses” public-house near by, perhaps to be identified with the house of that name now at 214, Holloway Road.
Highgate formed in those times another settled spot, where London citizens lived a rural life and cultivated the virtues and ruddy cheeks, amid villainously ill-reputed wastes to north and south. Finchley Common and its fringing Alsatias stretched north, as far as that other civilised interval, Barnet; and through the great common of Finchley ran the road which all who travelled north must pass, as messieurs the highwaymen knew full well.
In days before any kind of coach travelled the road, it was the usual thing for a traveller to get astride his own horse and so, bumping in the saddle, to come to his destination. Others, who, although owning no horses, had a good eye for horseflesh and were good at a bargain, would often purchase a mount and at the end of a long journey sell him to advantage. It was one of these travellers who, having bought a fine horse in London at a very moderate price, found when he had come to Finchley Common that he had acquired a very singular bargain indeed. Riding across the lonely waste, he saw another horseman advancing; whereupon his own horse, in the most curious manner, edged up to the stranger and pushed in so threatening a way against him that he, with every sign of fear, handed over his purse. The horse had obviously been the property of a highwayman.
The Manchester Mail changed horses at the “Old White Lion,” Finchley, as [the print after James Pollard shows]; and whether or not Pollard intended to convey any such idea, it looks distinctly a hostelry and a neighbourhood in which it would not be prudent for a stranger with much money about him to linger long after the mail had duly changed and driven off. What an astonishing change is that which has now come upon the scene!
