Whereas some evil-disposed person or persons did, in the night of Tuesday, the 17th instant, maliciously BREAK, DEFACE, and INJURE the STONE lately put up at Hindhead, by the Trustees of the Lower District of the Sheetbridge Turnpike Road, to perpetuate the memory of a murder committed there, in the place of one removed by John Hawkins, Esq.
Whoever will give information of the offender or offenders shall on his, her, or their conviction receive a Reward of Ten Guineas, which will be paid by Mr. James Howard, the Surveyor of the said Road.
Witley, 26th July, 1827.
NOTE.
“You, Mr. Editor,” says my pleasant correspondent R. N. P., “you, Mr. Editor, have journeyed from London to Portsmouth, and must recollect Hindhead—the luxury of riding round the rim of the Devil’s Punch-Bowl—the stone to perpetuate the memory of the sailor—the gibbet, &c.” Ah me! I travel little beyond books and imagination; my personal journeys are only gyration-like portions of a circle, scarcely of larger circumference than that allowed to a tethered dumb animal. If now and then, in either of the four seasons, I exceed this boundary, it is only for a few miles into one of the four counties—to a woodland height, a green dell, or beside a still flowing water—to enjoy the features of nature in loneliness and quiet—the sight of “every green thing” in a glorious noontide, the twilight, and the coming and going of the stars:—on a sunless day, the vapours of the sky dissolving into thin air, the flitting and sailing of the clouds, the ingatherings of night, and the thick darkness.
No, Mr. R. N. P., no sir, I am very little of a traveller, I have not seen any of the things you pleasure me by telling of in your vividly written letter. I know no gibbet of the murderer of a sailor, except one of the “men in chains” below Greenwich—whom I saw last Whitsuntide two-years through the pensioners’ telescopes from the Observatory[300]—was a slayer of his messmate; nor though I have heard and read of the Devil’s Punch-Bowl, have I been much nearer its “rim” than the gibbet of Jerry Abershaw at Wimbledon Common.
Abershaw was the last of the great highwaymen who, when people carried money about them, robbed every night, and sometimes in the open day, on Bagshot, Wimbledon, Finchley, and other commons, and high roads, in the neighbourhood of London. Some of these highwaymen of the “old school” lived in the wretched purlieus of Saffron-hill, and would mount and “take the road” in the afternoon from the end of Field-lane, at Holborn-bridge, as openly as travellers setting out from an inn. On the order in council, in 1797, which prohibited the Bank from paying in specie, gold went out, and bank-notes came in; and as these were easily concealed, and when stolen were difficult to pass, the business of “the highway” fell off, and highwaymen gradually became extinct. Jerry Abershaw was the most noted, because he was the most desperate, and most feared of these marauders. He was a reckless desperado who, pistol in hand, would literally have “your money, or your life;” and perhaps both. He was as famous in his day as Sixteen-string-Jack, or the Flying Highwayman. He shot several persons; his trial excited as much interest as Thurtell’s; and the concourse of people at his execution was innumerable. It was in the height of summer; and the following Sunday being fine, London seemed a deserted city; for hundreds of thousands went to see Abershaw hanging in chains. His fame will outlast his gibbet, which I suppose has been down years ago. The papers tell us, that the duke of Clarence, as Lord High Admiral, ordered down the pirates’ gibbets from the river-side. These were the last “men in chains” in the vicinage of the metropolis.
*
July, 1827.