In July 1813 the clerk of the Valleyfield Dépôt sent to the banks twenty-six forged guinea notes which were about to be sold, but were detected by the turnkey.
The Frenchmen seem to have chiefly selected for imitation the notes of the Bank of Scotland, and the Commercial Banking Company of Scotland, as these had little or no pictorial delineation, and consisted almost entirely of engraved penmanship. The forgers had to get suitable paper, and, as there were no steel pens in those days, a few crow quills served their purpose. They had confederates who watched the ins and outs of the turnkey; and, in addition to imitating the lettering on the face of the note, they had to forge the watermark, the seals of the bank, and the Government stamp. The bones of their ration food formed, literally, the groundwork of the forger’s productions, and as these had to be properly scraped and smoothed into condition before being in a state to be worked upon with ordinary pocket-knives, if the result was often so crude as to deceive only the veriest yokel, the Scottish banks might be thankful that engraving apparatus was unprocurable.
The following advertisement of the Bank of Scotland emphasizes this crudity of execution:
‘Several forged notes, in imitation of the notes of the governor and company of the Bank of Scotland, having appeared, chiefly in the neighbourhood of the dépôts of French prisoners of war, a caution is hereby, on the part of the said governors and company, given against receiving such forged notes in payment. And whoever shall, within three months from the date hereof, give such information as shall be found sufficient, on lawful trial, to convict any one concerned in forging or feloniously uttering any of the said notes, shall receive a reward of a hundred pounds sterling. These forged notes are executed by the hand with a pen or pencil, without any engraving. In most of them the body of the note has the appearance of foreign handwriting. The names of the bank officers are mostly illegible or ill-spelled. The ornamental characters of the figures generally ill-executed. The seals are very ill-imitated. To this mark particular attention is requested.’
The seals, bearing the arms of the Bank of Scotland, are of sheep’s bone, and were impressed upon the note with a hammer, also probably of bone, since all metal tools were prohibited. The partially executed forgery of a Bank of Scotland guinea note shows the process of imitating the lettering on the note in dotted outline, for which the forgers had doubtless some good reason, which is not at once patent to us.
Until 1810 the punishment for forgery was the hulks. During that year the law in England took a less merciful view of the crime, and offenders were sentenced to death; and until 1829, when the last man was hanged for forgery, this remained the law.
As to Scotland Mr. Forbes says: ‘The administration was probably not so severe as in England ... no French prisoner suffered anything more than a slight incarceration, and a subsequent relegation to the prison ships, where some thousands of his countrymen already were.’
Armed with a Home Office permit I visited the prisons in the rock of Edinburgh Castle. Owing to the facts that most of them have been converted into military storerooms and that their substance does not lend itself readily to destruction, they remain probably very much as when they were filled with the war-prisoners, and, with their heavily built doors and their strongly barred apertures, which cannot be called windows, their darkness and cold, the silence of their position high above even the roar of a great city, convey still to the minds of the visitors of to-day a more real impression of the meaning of the word ‘imprisonment’ than does any other war-prison, either extant or pictured. At Norman Cross, at Portchester, at Stapleton, at Dartmoor, at Perth, there were at any rate open spaces for airing grounds, but at Edinburgh there could have been none, unless the narrow footway, outside the line of caverns, from the wall of which the precipice falls sheer down, was so utilized.
Near the entrance to the French prisons the following names are visible on the wall:
Charles Jobien, Calais, 1780.