"Whereas you desired a true and faithful messenger should be sent from Newcastle to the parish of Lesbury, to inquire concerning John Maklin; I gave you to understand that no such man was known ever to be, or hath lived there for these fifty years past, during which time I, Patrick Makel Wian, have been minister of that parish, wherein I have all that time been present, taught, and do yet continue to teach there. But that I may give you some satisfaction, you shall understand that I was born in Galloway in Scotland, in the year 1546, bred up in the University of Edinburgh, where I commenced Master of Arts, whence, travelling into England, I kept school, and sometimes preached, till in the first of King James I was inducted into the church of Lesbury, where I now live. As to what concerns the change of my body, it is now the third year since I had two new teeth, one in my upper, the other in my nether jaw, as is apparent to the touch. My sight, much decayed many years ago, is now, about the 110th year of my age, become clearer; hair adorns me heretofore bald skull. I was never of a fat, but a slender mean habit of body. My diet has ever been moderate, nor was I ever accustomed to feasting and tippling: hunger is the best sauce; nor did I ever use to feed to satiety. All this is most certain and true, which I have seriously, though overhastily, confirmed to you, under the hand of PATRICK MAKEL WIAN, Minister of Lesbury."
Mr. Stockdale adds, that there is a tradition that when the Plague visited Lesbury, in the reign of Charles II., those who were infected were removed to tents on the neighbouring moor, where the venerable pastor attended them with great assiduity, ministering to their wants temporal and spiritual. The date of his death is unknown.
E. H. A.
Indignities on the Bodies of Suicides (Vol. v., p. 272.).
—I much doubt whether burying in cross roads was originally meant as an indignity. I think this is nearly connected with my still unanswered Query, What is a Tye? Vol. iii., p. 263. I suspect suicides were buried in a cross road, because that was a place where a cross or crucifix stood, and only second in sanctity to the churchyard; and the stake driven through the body was perhaps first intended not as an insult, but to keep the ghost of the suicide from walking on the earth again.
I would willingly believe our ancestors were not always such savages as R. S. F. shows us the Scotch once were in this respect. I fear at that time we were not much better.
A. HOLT WHITE.
To my previous Note, I beg leave to append a passage from Arnot's Criminal Trials (p. 368.), which may tend to throw some light on this subject. In speaking of the witch prosecutions in Scotland, this writer says:
"If an unfortunate woman, trembling at a citation for witchcraft, ended her sufferings by her own hand, she was dragged from her house at a horse's tail, and buried under the gallows."
R. S. F.