but waking saw his face no more. Very few, so far as I can make out, not more than one in five or six, ever returned.
This, it may be said, was only what they might have expected, the law being what it was—just the ordinary thing. The hideous part of the business was that, as an effect of the alarm created in the minds of those who feared injury to their property and loss of power to oppress the poor labourers, there was money in plenty subscribed to hire witnesses for the prosecution. It was necessary to strike terror into the people. The smell of blood-money brought out a number of scoundrels who for a few pounds were only too ready to swear away the life of any man, and it was notorious that numbers of poor fellows were condemned in this way.
One incident as to this point may be given in conclusion of this chapter about old unhappy things. It relates not to one of those who were sentenced to the gallows or to transportation, but to an inquest and the treatment of the dead.
I have spoken in the last chapter of the mob that visited Hindon, Fonthill, and other villages. They ended their round at Pytt House, near Tisbury, where they broke up the machinery. On that occasion a body of yeomanry came on the scene, but arrived only after the mob had accomplished its purpose of breaking up the thrashing machines. When the troops appeared the "rioters," as they were called, made off into the woods and escaped; but before they fled one of them had met his death. A number of persons from the farms and villages around had gathered at the spot and were looking on, when one, a farmer from the neighbouring village of Chilmark, snatched a gun from a gamekeeper's hand and shot one of the rioters, killing him dead. On 27th January 1831 an inquest was held on the body, and some one was found to swear that the man had been shot by one of the yeomanry, although it was known to everybody that, when the man was shot, the troop had not yet arrived on the scene. The man, this witness stated, had attacked, or threatened, one of the soldiers with his stick, and had been shot. This was sufficient for the coroner; he instructed his jury to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide," which they obediently did. "This verdict," the coroner then said, "entailed the same consequences as an act of felo-de-se, and he felt that he could not give a warrant for the burial of the deceased. However painful the duty devolved on him in thus adding to the sorrows of the surviving relations, the law appeared too clear to him to admit of an alternative."
The coroner was just as eager as the judges to exhibit his zeal for the gentry, who were being injured in their interests by these disturbances; and though he could not hang anybody, being only a coroner, he could at any rate kick the one corpse brought before him. Doubtless the "surviving relations," for whose sorrows he had expressed sympathy, carried the poor murdered man off by night to hide him somewhere in the earth.
After the law had been thus vindicated and all the business done with, even to the corpse-kicking by the coroner, the farmers were still anxious, and began to show it by holding meetings and discussions on the condition of the labourers. Everybody said that the men had been very properly punished; but at the same time it was admitted that they had some reason for their discontent, that, with bread so dear, it was hardly possible for a man with a family to support himself on seven shillings a week, and it was generally agreed to raise the wages one shilling. But by and by when the anxiety had quite died out, when it was found that the men were more submissive than they had ever been, the lesson they had received having sunk deep into their minds, they cut off the extra shilling and wages were what they had been—seven shillings a week for a hard-working seasoned labourer, with a family to keep, and from four to six shillings for young unmarried men and for women, even for those who did as much work in the field as any man.
But there were no more risings.