“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._
[298] A deep valley in Surrey, so called from its circular form. It is
about forty-one miles from London.
[299] The old stone was destroyed at the alteration of the road; but a
new one has very recently been erected on the new road.
[300] Told of in the _Every-Day Book_.
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