et dure, i. e., they were pressed to death " by heavy weights laid upon a board that lieth over their breasts and a sharp stone over their backs, and these commonly hold their peace, thereby to save their goods unto their wives and children, which, if they were con demned should be confiscated to the Prince." In 1657-8, a Major Strangways suffered in this way in Newgate; he was arraigned for the murder of his brother-in-law, Mr. Fussell, but refused to plead unless assured that, if condemned, he would be shot as Mr. Fussell was, and so the peine forte et dure was admin istered to him. The process of killing him took eight or ten minutes, although an angle of the press had been purposely placed over his heart so that he might the sooner be de prived of life, " though he was denied what is usual in these cases, to have a sharp piece of timber under his back to hasten execu tion." A curious light is thrown on the kind of life led by many apprentices, especially par ish ones, by the cases of the Meteyards, mother and daughter, and of Elizabeth Brownrigg. The Meteyards, milliners, had as an apprentice a sickly girl named Anne Taylor; to escape the cruelty with which, owing to her inability to do as much work as her mistress desired, she was treated, the girl ran away. She was caught, brought back, flogged nearly to death with a broom handle, and tied with a rope to the door of a room so that she could neither sit nor lie down. After three days of this discipline she died. Mrs. Brownrigg, a midwife, kept her ap prentice, Mary Clifford, in a coal cellar; bringing her out from time to time to strip her naked and flog her with a horsewhip, an exercise in which, when weary of it, she was relieved by her son. All these three wretches were hanged. The mother Meteyard had a fit on the morning of her execution and was carried to the gallows and hanged in a state of insensibility. The executioners in those days were far
from expert and frequently bungled their work. The rope broke with Captain Kidd the pirate, and he had to be tied up again in a perfectly conscious condition. " The friends of another pirate, John Gow, were anxious to put him out of pain, and pulled his legs so hard that the rope broke before he was dead, necessitating the repetition of the whole cer emony." The successive hangmen to the city of London cannot here be described with any detail; one of them, John Price, who filled the office in 171 8 and bore the ex offieio title of " Jack Ketch," was himself arrested on the way to Tyburn, on a charge of murdering a woman whom he had attempted to outrage, and hanged at Bunhill Fields, his body being afterwards exhibited in chains in Holloway near the scene of the crime. Calcraft started life as a cobbler and got his post through an accidental meeting with the then public executioner, Foxen. He saw a man leaning against a lamp post cough ing violently, and advised him to take pep permint for it; Foxen — whom it proved to be — said that he could not carry on his du ties much longer. "I think I could do that sort of job," said Calcraft, and he got it. He retired in 1874; his successor, Marwood, a Lincolnshire man and also a shoemaker, was the first to make a scientific system of executions in England by careful calculations as to the necessary drop. The present public executioner is Billington. Abduction was a common offense in the annals of Newgate. A typical case was that of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a barrister who carried off a Miss Turner, a schoolgirl of barely fifteen, the only child of a gentle man of large property in Cheshire, and in duced her to go through a form of marriage with him at Gretna Green, by persuading her that it was the sole way of saving her father from ruin. Wakefield and his brother, who had assisted him, were sentenced to three years' penal servitude, and the mar riage was annulled by act of Parliament.
