and the rooms are hung with skeletons. This monster was suggested by Blaise Ferrage, or Seyé, who in 1779 and 1780 lived in the Pyrenees, and captured men and women whom he devoured.[113]
One of the most terrible and extraordinary cases of cannibalism was that of Sawney Beane, the son of peasants in East Lothian, who was born in a village at no great distance from Edinburgh towards the close of the fourteenth century. He and a girl in the same district wandered away in company, and took up their abode in a cave on the coast of Galloway. It is said this cavern extended nearly a mile under the sea. Here they lived by robbing travellers, and carrying off their bodies to their lair they cooked and ate them. Eight sons and six daughters they gendered, and the whole tribe used to set forth upon marauding expeditions, sometimes attacking as many as five and six persons travelling in company. Grandchildren were born to this savage, and it is said that for more than five and twenty years these cannibals killed men on the highway and dragging the prey to their lair fed upon human flesh. Suspicion was often aroused, and even panic ensued, but so skilfully had nature concealed the opening to the cave that it was long ere the gang could be traced and captured. The whole family were put to death amid the most horrible torments in the year 1435 at Edinburgh. It is probable that in the first place Beane and his female companion were driven to necrophagy by starvation, and the horrid craving for human flesh once tasted became a mad passion. The children born into such conditions would be cannibalistic as a matter of course.
Sawney Beane was made the subject of a romance—Sawney Beane, the Man-eater of Midlothian, by Thomas Preskett Prest, who, between the years 1840 and 1860 was the most famous and most popular purveyor of the “shocker” which circulated in immense numbers. Prest’s greatest success was Sweeney Todd, a character who was once supposed actually to have lived, but who is almost certainly fiction. It will be remembered that Todd’s victims disappeared through a revolving trap-door into the cellars of his hosue. Their bodies, when stripped and rifled, were handed over to be used by Mrs. Lovett, who resided next door and kept a pie-shop which was greatly frequented. Once it so happened that the supply ran short
