“Ay, and I minds how my daddy used to make teeny horseshoes, knife handles, and netting needles, outen the bits o’ wood he tshin’d (cut) off the gibbet post, and wery good oak it was. Mebbe you’s heard o’ Tom Otter’s post nigh to the woods? Ah, but p’raps you’s never been tell’d that our Tom was born’d under it? The night my mammy were took bad, our tents was a’most blown to bits. The wind banged the old irons agen the post all night long, as I’ve heard her say. And when they wanted to name the boy, they couldn’t think of no other name but Tom, for sure as they tried to get away from it, the name kept coming back again—Tom, Tom, Tom—till it sort o’ dinned itself into their heads. So at last my daddy says, ‘Let’s call him Tom and done with it,’ and i’ time, folks got a-calling him Tom o’ the Gibbet, and it stuck to him, it did. There, now, I must give that here maila (donkey) a bite o’ summut.”
But I have not done with Tom Otter.
Here is a story even more “creepy” than the last. Ashena is again the speaker. “I’ them days I’d some delations as did funny things that folks wouldn’t never think o’ doing nowadays. I’d an uncle as used to talk to the Beng (Devil). If anything went wrong wi’ a hoss, he’d say, ‘Beng, do this, and Beng, do that,’ like we talks to the Duvel (God) when we says ’ur prayers. But he weren’t eddicated, you see, he didn’t know no better. And whenever uncle and aunt used to pass by Tom Otter’s gibbet, they’d stop and look up at the poor man hanging there, and they allus wuser’d (threw) him a bit o’ hawben (food). They couldn’t let theirselves go by wi’out doing that.
“And there was a baker from Harby, and whenever he passed by the place he would put a bread loaf on to the pointed end of a long rod and shove it into that part o’ the irons where poor Tom’s head was, and sure enough the bread allus went. The baker got hisself into trouble for doing that, as I’ve heard our old people say.”
Commenting on a parallel instance, occurring about the year 1779, in which some women were wont to throw up to a gibbeted man a bunch of tallow candles for him to eat, the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, in his Book of Folk-Lore, writes: “Obviously the idea was still prevalent that life continued to exist in the body after execution.”
In the procession of “characters” issuing from the dark court, I see two familiar figures, the parents of my Gypsy schoolmate, who would surely have arrested even a stranger’s gaze.
Partly from age, and partly from the habit of his calling, Plato Smith the tinman stooped somewhat, yet his legs, which were long in comparison with his body, carried him over the ground fast enough. A nearer view of the old man’s countenance revealed certain scars concerning which tales were told to his credit as a fighter. True, he had on one occasion been worsted by an adversary, for the bridge of his nose diverged somewhat from the straight line, a record of a telling blow. Always alert, Plato looked the picture of spryness when soap and water had removed all traces of the workshop, and he had donned a green cutaway coat, a bright yellow neckcloth, and a felt “hat of antique shape,” high in the crown and broad of brim, which was pulled well over his eyes whenever he went out. It was whispered that none knew better than he how to whistle a horse out of a field, but in this art I fancy he had grown rusty of late years. To be sure, his long record as a poacher had brought him occasional lodgments in the local house of detention, yet so ingrained was this Gypsy habit that he could hardly refrain from chalking his gun-barrel and sallying forth on moonlit nights.
A riverside incident associated with Sibby’s father is as fresh in my memory as if it happened but yesterday. A stream neither broad nor deep is our homely Witham, crawling onward through fenny flats to the North Sea. It was here that I learned on summer days to pull an oar in an old black coble, and to glide steel-shod over the ice in the Christmas holidays. Along a certain reach of the river, I was initiated by an elder brother into the mysteries of angling on those tranquil evenings when the bold perch showed their heads above water, like the fishes that listened to St. Anthony’s sermon. Now it fell upon a day that my brother and I were crossing the river by ferry-boat, a few miles outside the city, our companions being Plato Smith and an ecclesiastic from the minster-close—four happy anglers were we. At one end of the flat-bottomed ferry-boat stood the parson fingering his rod and whistling a lively tune, when, in midstream, there was a sudden hitch in the chain, flinging the perspiring ferryman upon his face, and at the same time precipitating our friend from the minster-close headlong into the river. Never have I seen a wild duck, or a white-pate coot, disappear more cleanly from sight than did our brother of “the cloth” into the liquid element. Thanks mainly to Gypsy Plato’s resourcefulness, he was extricated pretty quickly, and we left him in the care of an innkeeper, in whose parlour at dusk we met him in borrowed raiment, looking more than usually pallid of countenance beneath the broad eaves of our kindly host’s old-fashioned Sunday “topper” padded to fit with a vivid red handkerchief.
A personality even more striking was Plato’s consort, Abigail, as you saw her sunning herself under the parapet of the Witham bridge hard by the “Three Magpies” Inn, her black eyes blinking as a gust from the river flapped the loose ends of her gay kerchiefs which she wore three or four deep, meeting on her bosom in old-time style. Hooked like a falcon’s beak, her nose drooped over her pursed lips towards a prominent chin, giving her a witchlike mien. Quadrupled strings of corals encircled her wizened neck, and a black velvet bodice bedecked with silver buttons, a skirt of bold check pattern, and a poke-bonnet formed her customary walking attire. Often, on her homeward way after her daily round with the basket, have I met her puffing a small black pipe as she shuffled along our lane. By didakais (half-breeds) she was certainly feared, and they maintained it was bad luck to meet her first thing of a morning, and were known to turn back on seeing her in the street. “Her eyes make you feel that queer” was a common saying, and it follows that she ranked high as a fortune-teller. Seldom a fair passed but you met her in the noisy throng, chaffing the gawjê (gentiles), or surrounded by a group of village Johnnies and Mollies eager to have their palms read. What a picture she made as she stooped to tighten the girths of her shaggy donkey at whose head stood the wild, dusky Sibby with a spring wind whisking her black locks about her cheeks, out on the open road beyond the town, for maid and mother were devoted companions on many a foray into the villages dotted over Lincoln Heath.
Another conspicuous character of the court was a quaint little hunchback, a pedlar by trade, whose sad deformity and resentful temper caused him to become the butt of every street gamin’s joke. He would often be seen in company with Sammy Noble, a wooden-legged vendor of firewood. The pair, I regret to say, called too frequently at taverns, and more than once I have seen them assisted home by kindly policemen, or “peelers,” as they were then called, who if resurrected to-day in their long black coats and chimney-pot hats, would surely be taken for nothing short of cathedral dignitaries.