Page:The histories of Launceston and Dunheved, in the county of Cornwall.djvu/410

372 ST. THOMAS CHURCH. We defer comment on the " hoggener's monye," but we venture to make at once some observations on our extracts relating to prisoners. In the year 1558 both the Lent and Lammas Assizes for Cornwall were held in the adjoining borough of Dun- heved, and the victims of the savage laws of the time were hanged in the keep court of the Castle — " the Castle Green." The dead bodies were borne thence to St. Thomas churchyard, either in carts, or on biers — frames of wood known as " ladders," and possibly resembling the modern handbarrow. In that quiet churchyard a pit was dug for them, the bodies were washed (see post), and thus, apparently in the shroud of cleansed skins, they were cast into their earthen bed, and " there they lie, heaps upon heaps ! " No register reveals the name, the sex, or even the fact of interment, of these friendless, hapless creatures. The morbid craving of some persons to possess in- animate things which have touched dead criminals is shown as much by the desire to obtain the " ladders " on which these breathless wretches had rested, as by the passion of to-day for acquiring pieces of the hangman's rope. Our repugnance to the purchaser of a prisoner's clothes is not much lessened by the great antiquity of a usage which was akin to it. A thousand years before Christ, the psalmist adverted to a practice which, (we say it reverently,) was cited and acted upon at the crucifixion : " They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots." The Castle Green is reputed to be extra-parochial, but may we assume that it is within the ecclesiastical circuit of St. Thomas ? Why, otherwise, were those who died within that Green buried in St. Thomas churchyard ? Later accounts have much more on the painful subject to which we have just been adverting.