that the servant was acquitted, and the Ferryman made accessary and
cause of his own death. The estate of Overs then fell to his daughter,
and her lover hearing of it, hastened up from the country; but, in
riding post, his horse stumbled, and he brake his neck on the highway.
The young heiress was almost distracted at these events, and was
recalled to her faculties only by having to provide for her father’s
interment; for he was not permitted to have Christian burial, being
considered as an excommunicated man, on account of his extortions,
usury, and truly miserable life. The Friars of Bermondsey Abbey were,
however, prevailed upon, by money, their Abbot being then away, to
give a little earth to the remains of the wretched Ferryman. But upon
the Abbot’s return, observing a grave which had been but recently
covered in, and learning who lay there, he was not only angry with
his Monks for having done such an injury to the Church, for the sake
of gain, but he also had the body taken up again, laid on the back of
his own Ass, and, turning the animal out at the Abbey gates, desired
of God that he might carry him to some place where he best deserved
to be buried. The Ass proceeded with a gentle and solemn pace through
Kent Street, and along the highway, to the small pond once called St.
Thomas a Waterings, then the common place of execution, and shook
off the Ferryman’s body directly under the gibbet, where it was put
into the ground, without any kind of ceremony. Mary Overs, extremely
distressed by such a succession of sorrows, and desirous to be free
from the importunity of the numerous suitors for her hand and fortune,
resolved to retire into a cloister; which she shortly afterwards did,
having first provided for the foundation of that Church which still
commemorates her name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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