THE HIGHWAYMEN OF WILTSHIRE AND SALISBURY PLAIN—MR. JOSEPH READER'S ADVENTURE—THE CHERHILL GANG—"CLIBBORN'S POST"—MURDER OF MR. MELLISH—CLOSE OF THE HIGHWAYMAN ERA

Many of the stories in these pages are concerned with the doings of highwaymen in the districts near London, but the neighbourhood of almost every town was infested in degree, and there are few local histories, and fewer of the older newspaper files, that do not afford curious reading in the highway robbery sort, intermingled with advertisements offering rewards for the apprehension of horse- and sheep-stealers and fugitive husbands who have left their wives and families chargeable upon the parish. The neighbourhoods of Devizes and Salisbury seem to have been exceptionally favoured with these miscellaneous rascals, no doubt because those two places stood at either extreme of what long remained the wild and desolate region including Salisbury Plain, where, although the great roads to Bath and Exeter brought a considerable traffic, the houses were few and far between. It was an ideal district for evil-doers, and there are a very considerable literature and a very startling series of incidents in this sort, connected with it. [1]

A curious incident is that told on an old broadsheet printed in 1712, and sold at the usual broadsheet price of one penny, of the hanging of a highwayman by one of the travellers he attacked. On Saturday, February 2nd, in that year, a Mr. Nat. Seager, a maltster, took horse from Shaftesbury for Blandford, to buy corn in Blandford market. He had only gone two miles and had descended into the plain from the hill-top town, when "he was attack'd by a Highway-Man and a pistol clap'd to his Breast, with the Word of Command 'God D—n you, you old Dog, alight and deliver.'"

Mr. Seager, very much terrified, dismounted, or perhaps, rather, tumbled off his horse, and threw the man £3 in silver; but the highwayman was not content with this. "It was not all," he said; and, rapping out another oath, he drew a broadsword and gave Mr. Seager a cut on the shoulder. Whereupon Mr. Seager produced twenty-four guineas more, with which the highwayman rode off contented, leaving the unfortunate maltster bleeding on the ground.

In a little while there came along the road another traveller, Mr. Joseph Reader, miller, of Shaftesbury, whistling upon his way, according to his habit.

"What is the matter?" he asked, surprised to see his friend and neighbour lying there, all gory.

Seager told him.

"Master," said Reader, "lend me your horse, and I will endeavour to overtake the rogue, if you will describe him to me."

"He has a great blue coat, and a sorrel horse," replied Seager: and with that, Reader mounted and hastened the way he had gone.

It was not long before he overtook the highwayman, who was waiting for more prey, and thought he saw it in Reader. Twice he fired pistols at him, and twice he missed; and then Reader, who was by far the stronger of the two, smote him with a cudgel he carried, and dragged him from his horse. At this moment Seager came up and found them struggling on the ground, and Reader immediately despatched him for aid.

But when he was gone, and our brave miller had opportunity for reflection, it occurred to him that his adversary might by some means get the better of him, after all, before help arrived; and so he stood the risk of losing the £40 reward due to him for taking a highwayman. That was a risk not to be entertained, and "therefore," said he, "I'll e'en hang him myself." And so he did. Striking him insensible, he dragged the unlucky man to a wayside tree, and hanged him from it by his own belt.

The highwayman had not long given up the ghost before Seager returned, at the head of the Sheriff's posse; when the miller learned, much to his dismay, that, by acting as hangman upon one who had not been brought to trial, he had put himself in very grave peril.

In fact, the law, resenting this interference with its prerogative, had a good deal to say to Mr. Joseph Reader, who was brought to trial at Dorchester before Mr. Justice Coker, at the next assizes, and charged with murder. Fortunately, he was acquitted, and his resourcefulness properly acknowledged by a subscription of over £30, made up for him in Court.

Not only solitary highwaymen, but bands of marauders, scoured the treeless and hedgeless wastes of Salisbury Plain and its neighbourhood. One of these was known as the "Cherhill Gang," and chiefly favoured the locality between Marlborough, Calne, and Devizes. Individual members of this brotherhood were taken from time to time, hanged at Devizes, and afterwards gibbeted at a spot high on the downs, between Beckhampton and Cherhill. The remaining members of the band and the friends and relations of the departed of course bitterly resented this kind of post-mortem publicity, and very often they would either come by night and saw through the post of the gibbet and so bring the whole thing to the ground, or would climb up the post and bring down the tattered relics of their friend, swinging there in his chains or his iron cage, and give it decent burial. There is much to be said in favour of them. But after this had continued for some time, the authorities hit upon a plan of binding the lower portion of the gibbet round with iron, of tarring it, and of driving some hundreds of nails half-way into the post, just by way of deterrents to climbers and others.

A very pretty story—pretty in its peculiar way—is told of Serjeant Merewether successfully defending one of the Cherhill Gang at the assizes, and of his being robbed of his fee that night, by his interesting client, when on his return home.

Another member of the same gang had the peculiar fancy of stripping himself perfectly naked, by night, and then springing out of a wayside bush upon the startled traveller. The unexpected spectacle, he said, was so alarming that robbery became very easy. But this was probably only a midsummer freak. Imagination refuses to contemplate even the most desperate highwaymen in midwinter, when snow-squalls swept Marlborough Downs, emulating those picturesque figures, the naked aborigines of the poet's vision:

When, wild in woods, the noble savage ran.

I will quote here but one of the many old newspaper reports of doings on this spot, but that a picturesque one. The date is January 1743: "A captain in the army, who was going to Bath in a postchaise, was stopped near Sandy Lane by two highwaymen, by one of whom he was told that he wanted but a guinea, which he hoped to be soon able to pay him again. The captain gave him the guinea, and the fellow gave the driver a shilling, and told the gentleman if he was stopped by any one else, to say 'Virgin Mary,' that being the watchword for the day. They had not gone far before they were stopped by four persons; but on being given the watchword, they raised their hats, and rode off."

The visible relics of the highwaymen are few, but among them that of "Clibborn's Post" is peculiarly interesting. This relic is found in Hertfordshire, in the neighbourhood of that fine old Elizabethan manor-house, now a farm, but famed in romance, Queen Hoo Hall. On the way from Tewin and Queen Hoo Hall to Bramfield, the wooded lane rises in a curve to the summit of what is known locally as "Open Valley Hill." Here, on the grassy bank, firmly planted in the soil, stands a stout, oaken post, carefully bound with strips of iron. This is "Clibborn's Post," the modern successor of the original stake driven through the body of a brutal highwayman of that name, shot dead at this spot in the act of attacking a farmer who was on his way home from Hertford Market to Datchworth. This occurrence happened on December 28th, 1782. There had, about that time, been many highway robberies committed on the country roads in this neighbourhood; but no one had been able to identify the desperado, who had plunged the countryside, and especially the week-end market folk, into such terror. On this particular night this farmer was driving home in a cart, accompanied by a servant named Shock. Just as they reached this spot—then, as now, a lonely place surrounded by tangled undergrowth and dense plantations—a man rushed out from the thickets and seized the horse's reins. The farmer jumped down to struggle with him, but his assailant was getting the upper hand, and was in the act of unclasping a knife to cut his throat, when the farmer called out to his servant, who carried a blunderbuss: "Shoot, Shock, or I am a dead man!" Shock had been afraid to fire, thinking he might hit the wrong man, but, on this command, he let fly, and shot the highwayman dead. When they examined the body they found it to be that of a pieman named Clibborn, a well-known and ostensibly honest person who frequented the Hertford inns on market day, selling pies to the farmers and others. He had opportunities of noting those who would be carrying large sums of money home with them; and, leaving early, waylaid them in some lonely spot such as this.

It was still, at the close of the eighteenth century, abundantly possible for peaceful travellers along the roads to be killed by highwaymen: Mr. Mellish, a city merchant, returning from a day with the King's hounds, in company with two friends, named Bosanquet and Pole, having been shot dead by a gang, who attacked and robbed the carriage in which they were travelling, when near Sipson Green, on the Bath Road. It was a wanton act, too; the travellers having disbursed their money on demand, and the carriage already starting off again for Hounslow when one of the gang fired a shot after it. Mr. Mellish, sitting with his back to the horses, was struck in the forehead. It is probable that the highwayman intended no more than to warn the occupants of the carriage that he and his fellows really were fully armed, and that they had therefore better hasten away as quickly as they could; but the intention is immaterial: the unfortunate man was killed, and the highwaymen were never captured.

The nineteenth century opened badly for the highwaymen, for not only had the business of banking and the payment of money by cheque grown largely, but Pitt's Act for Restricting Cash Payments, passed in 1797, had led to fewer large amounts in coin being carried about their persons by unprotected travellers. Nothing was more remarkable than the great sums of money that seem to have been carried by all classes in the periods already discussed; and in those circumstances lay the highwaymen's opportunity. But now they had fewer and smaller takings in coin, practically a choice only between watches and jewellery and bank-notes: very dangerous classes of property to handle unlawfully.

But if their takings were less, their numbers were scarcely fewer; and the gibbets were still not infrequently replenished. Thus, a highwayman named Haines was, in May 1799, gibbeted on Hounslow Heath, just where the Bath and the Exeter roads part company, at the western extremity of Hounslow town. A curious item in the Annual Register for that year proves—if proof were wanted—that the spectacle of his hanging had been a popular sight; for there we read an account of how a party of eight gentlemen, who had been out for the day to witness the spectacle, ferried over the Thames to the "Flower Pot" inn at Sunbury that night, at ten o'clock, presumably with the intention of "making a night of it." It may not be uncharitable to suppose that they had already taken more than sufficient, for in crossing the river, the boat was upset and three of them were drowned.

The stumps of the gibbets that formerly stood at the fork of the Exeter and the Bath roads, at the western end of Hounslow were discovered in 1899, when the road was excavated for the electric tramways that now pass the spot.

At the close of the eighteenth century, the approaches to London again became so dangerous that it was necessary to institute some kind of protection. This was established in 1805, under the name of the Bow Street Patrol, and was organised, as its name implies, from the principal London police-office. This was a forerunner of the existing horse-patrols of the Metropolitan Police, to be now and again encountered at night on lonely suburban roads in these far more secure times of ours. Even Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common grew comparatively safe when this armed and efficient force got to work. They were probably not in full existence when the poet Campbell and his wife, walking on Sydenham Common in that year, were confronted by a mounted highwayman who demanded their money, with menaces. An alarm was promptly raised, and he was pursued and captured; when he was found to be a resident of the neighbourhood.

In the provinces the era of the highwaymen was longer lived. The roads between Arundel and Chichester were in 1807, for example, haunted by one Allen, a highwayman who preyed chiefly upon the farmers coming home with well-filled purses from market. The militia were called out to capture him, and thus, in these peculiarly glorious circumstances of war, he was shot dead near Midhurst, while endeavouring to escape arrest.