I have seen in an Exeter paper an article taken from "NOTES AND QUERIES," entitled "Execution under singular Circumstances," the writer of which is in manifest error. There is no such thing as a warrant for execution; I will venture to say it could not have happened as is therein stated. I have been repeatedly undersheriff of Devon, and therefore beg to state the mode in which executions take place.
At the end of the assizes the crown-bar judge and the clerk of assize sit down quietly together, and go over the sentences of the prisoners, after which they are classed, and a fair copy signed by the clerk of the assize—not the judge—is delivered to the undersheriff, which is his only authority for carrying the different sentences into execution. If a man is to be hung, opposite his name is written, "Let him be hanged by the neck," and an asterisk is added to draw the undersheriff's attention. Should the man afterwards be respited, the judge, or the clerk of assize, writes to the undersheriff, and also (ex abundanti cautelâ) to the gaoler, to say so. Should the undersheriff hear nothing further, he hangs the man at the end of the respite, as a matter of course. A reprieve comes from the secretary of state's office. At the end of the shrievalty this list of sentences is sent to the Court of Exchequer, as forming part of what is called the Bill of Cravings, and in which the sheriff is allowed a certain sum towards the expenses of the execution. What may be the practice in London I do not know, but the above would be the practice at Winchester.
P. J.
Exeter, Sept. 15. 1851.
COCKNEY.
(Vol. iv., p. 237.)
Halliwell illustrates this word by a quotation from Nash's Pierce Penilesse, 1592:
"A young heyre or cockney, that is his mother's darling, if hee playde the waste-good at the innes of the court, or about London, falles in a quarrelling humor with his fortune, because she made him not king of the Indies."
Richardson gives the following quotation from Fuller's Worthies:
"I meet with a double sense of this word cockeney.... 1st, One coaks'd or cockered, made a wanton or nestle-cock of.... 2nd, One utterly ignorant of husbandry and housewifery, such as is practised in the country...."
Webster gives the following derivation, &c.: