As if it were your neck-verse.
In the anonymous Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell (1603), Act ii, sc. 1, we find this custom again referred to:
Farnese.—Ha, hah! Emulo not write and read?
Rice.—Not a letter, an you would hang him.
Urcenze.—Then he’ll never be saved by his book.
In Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, the moss-trooper, William of Deloraine, assures the lady, who had warned him not to look into what he should receive from the Monk of St. Mary’s Aisle, “be it scroll or be it book,” that
“Letter nor line know I never a one,
Were’t my neck-verse at Haribee”—
the place where such Border rascals were usually executed.
It was formerly the custom to sing a psalm at the gallows before a criminal was “turned off.” And there is a good story, in Zachary Gray’s notes to Hudibras, told of one of the chaplains of the famous Montrose; how, being condemned in Scotland to die for attending his master in some of his expeditions, and being upon the ladder and ordered to select a psalm to be sung, expecting a reprieve, he named the 119th Psalm, with which the officer attending the execution complied (the Scottish Presbyterians were great psalm-singers in those days), and it was well for him he did so, for they had sung it half through before the reprieve came. Any other psalm would certainly have hanged him! Cotton, in his Virgil Travestie, thus alludes to the custom of psalm-singing at the foot of the gallows: