See me on the fatal tree,
And pity my sad fate.
My guilty heart stung with grief,
With agony and pain,—
My tender brother I did slay
That fatal day for gain.”
This mode of procedure in “gallows” literature, and this style of composition, have prevailed for from twenty to thirty years. I find my usual impossibility to fix a date among these street-folk; but the Sorrowful Lamentation sheet was unknown until the law for prolonging the term of existence between the trial and death of the capitally-convicted, was passed. “Before that, sir,” I was told, “there wasn’t no time for a Lamentation; sentence o’ Friday, and scragging o’ Monday. So we had only the Life, Trial, and Execution.” Before the year 1820, the Execution broad-sheets, &c., were “got up” in about the same, though certainly in an inferior and more slovenly manner than at present; and one copy of verses often did service for the canticles of all criminals condemned to be hung. These verses were to sacred or psalm tunes, such as Job, or the Old Hundredth. I was told by an aged gentleman that he remembered, about the year 1812, hearing a song, or, as he called it, “stave,” of this description, not only given in the street with fiddle and nasal twang, to the tune of the Old Hundredth, but commencing in the very words of Sternhold and Hopkins—
“All people that on earth do dwell.”
These “death-verses,” as they were sometimes called, were very frequently sung by blind people, and in some parts of the country blind men and women still sing—generally to the accompaniment of a fiddle—the “copy of verses.” A London chaunter told me, that, a few years back, he heard a blind man at York announce the “verses” as from the “solitudes” of the condemned cell. At present the broad-sheet sellers usually sing, or chaunt, the copy of verses.
An intelligent man, now himself a street-trader, told me that one of the latest “execution songs” (as he called them) which he remembered to have heard in the old style—but “no doubt there were plenty after that, as like one another as peas in a boiling”—was on the murder of Weare, at Elstree, in Hertfordshire. He took great interest in such things when a boy, and had the song in question by heart, but could only depend upon his memory for the first and second verses: