Fragments of Two Centuries | Page 9

in similar difficulties, and to have to call up the
horses from a neighbouring farm to pull them through!
The difficulties for the older coaches and wagons were peculiarly
trying in this district on account of the hills and hollows, but one of the
most dreadful pieces of road at that time and for long afterwards, was
{12} that between Chipping and Buntingford, the foundations of which
were often little else but fagots thrown into a quagmire!
But besides bad vehicles and worse roads, there was a weird and a
horrid fascination about coaching in the eighteenth century, arising
from the vision of armed and well-mounted highwaymen, or of a
malefactor, after execution, hanging in chains on the gibbet by the
highway near the scene of his exploits!
Let us take one well authenticated case--the best authenticated perhaps
now known in England--in which a member of a respectable family in

Royston turned highwayman--an amateur highwayman one would fain
hope and believe--and paid the full penalty of the law, and was made to
illustrate the horrible custom of those times by hanging in chains on the
public highway! For this we must take the liberty of going a few years
back before George III. came to the throne. For some years before and
after that time, the noted old Posting House of the Red Lion, in the
High Street, Royston, was kept by a Mrs. Gatward. This good lady,
who managed the inn with credit to herself and satisfaction to her
patrons, unfortunately had a son, who, while attending apparently to the
posting branch of the business, could not resist the fascination of the
life of the highwaymen, who no doubt visited his mother's inn under
the guise of well-spoken gentlemen. Probably it was in dealing with
them for horses that young Gatward caught the infection of their roving
life, but what were the precise circumstances of his fall we can hardly
know; suffice it to say that his crime was one of robbing His Majesty's
mails, that he was evidently tried at the Cambridgeshire Assizes,
sentenced to death and afterwards to hang in chains on a gibbet, and
according to the custom of the times, somewhere near the scene of his
crime. The rest of his story is so well told by Cole, the Cambridgeshire
antiquary, in his MSS. in the British Museum, that the reader will
prefer to have it in his own words:--
"About 1753-4, the son of Mrs. Gatward, who kept the Red Lion, at
Royston, being convicted of robbing the mail, was hanged in chains on
the Great Road. I saw him hanging in a scarlet coat; after he had hung
about two or three months, it is supposed that the screw was filed
which supported him, and that he fell in the first high wind after. Mr.
Lord, of Trinity, passed by as he laid on the ground, and trying to open
his breast to see what state his body was in, not being offensive, but
quite dry, a button of brass came off, which he preserves to this day, as
he told me at the Vice-Chancellor's, Thursday, June 30, 1779. I sold
this Mr. Gatward, just as I left college in 1752, a pair of coach horses,
which was the only time I saw him. It was a great grief to his mother,
who bore a good character, and kept the inn for many years after."
{13}

There is a tradition, at least, that Mrs. Gatward afterwards obtained her
son's body and had it buried in the cellar of her house in the High Street.
The story is in the highest degree creditable to human nature, but there
is no proof beyond the tradition. As to the spot where the gibbeting
took place, the only clue we have is given in Cole's words: "Hanged in
chains on the Great Road." There seems no road that would so well
answer this description as the North Road or Great North Road, and, as
the spot must have been somewhere within a riding distance of
Cambridge, the incident has naturally been associated with Caxton
gibbet, a half-a-mile to the north of the village of Caxton, where a
finger-post like structure, standing on a mound by the side of the North
Road, still marks the spot where the original gibbet stood.
It seems almost incredible that we have travelled so far within so short
a time! That almost within the limits of two men's lives a state of things
prevailed which permitted a corpse to be lying about by the side of the
public highway, subject now to the insults, now to the pity, of the
passer-by! Yet many persons living remember the fire-side stories of
the dreadful penalties awaiting any person who dared to interfere with
the course of