ACCIDENTAL CONVERSATION.
go THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I believe the realistic description of a hanging, heard in an "accidental conversation" by your writer, to be quite true. In the West of England there remain, in the names of fields and crossways, many traces of the former brutalities of capital punishment. There are "Gallows" fields and " Fourches " crossways in many shy corners of Somerset.
I have evidence, by an eye-witness, of nine men being taken to Stone Gallows, near Taunton, in 1801, "each man sitting on his own coffin," and I have a rare broadside depicting a most hideous scene at the same gallows.
The Tyburn processions were in many cases similar, but it seems that, when a single culprit was to be hung, a hurdle was used instead of a waggon. The judgment of the Court on a culprit executed July 27th, 1781, where Connaught Square now stands, was that he "should be drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, and there be hanged by the neck, but not until he was dead ; that his bowels should be taken out and burned before his face ; that his head should then be severed from his body, and his body divided into four parts, to be at his Majesty's disposal." So much for the "good old times" !—I am, Sir, Sze., [The occasional use of the coffin as a seat for a criminal con- demned to the wallows must have lasted deep into this century. We remember hearing the story told by a nurse who cannot have been brought up in the "seventeens."—En. Spectator.]
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