In 1674 Thomas Jackson, a notorious highwayman, was executed for the murder of Henry Miller. He was hung in chains on a gibbet set up between two elm trees on Hampstead Heath, one of which still remains, known as “Gallows Tree.” Jackson left a “Recantation,” which was printed in quarto form immediately after his death. In this rare tract “is truly discovered the whole mystery of that Wicked and Fatal Profession of Padding in the Road.” In 1687 a person named Bunbury was barbarously murdered by one Loseby, who was caught almost red-handed, executed, and hung in chains on the top of a tumulus on the Watling Street Road, about four miles from Rugby. The spot is marked in Beighton’s map of Warwickshire, from a survey made in 1725, as “Loseby’s Gibbet.” The tumulus was demolished--as so many others unfortunately have been--in the latter part of the last century, on the making of a turnpike road between Daintry and Lutterworth.[44] In modern maps the site of the tumulus is forgotten, and the spot being now known as “Gibbet Hill,” the ancient history is wiped out, or, perhaps, to put it more justly, one kind of history replaces another, as it ever has done, in the revolutions of time, and an entirely new train of thoughts is called up. In 1690 one William Barwick, while out walking with his wife at Cawood, a few miles south of York, threw her into a pond, drowned her, drew her out, and buried her then and there, in her clothes. Barwick’s brother-in-law’s suspicions arose, and inquiries were set about; the man confessed, and was duly tried, condemned, and executed at York, and hung in chains by the side of the fatal pond. The curious part of this case was that Barwick’s brother-in-law was urged to move in the matter in consequence of his having seen, or fancied he saw--it was all the same in, and long after, the time of Matthew Hopkins[45]--a few days after the murder, the ghost of his sister, by the side of the water, at twelve o’clock in the daytime! And his deposition to that effect was taken before the Lord Mayor on the day preceding the trial.[46] Probably if Barwick had not confessed, his case, in those times, against such evidence as this, would have been quite hopeless. When the convicted man mounted the gallows he naïvely told the hangman that he hoped the rope was strong enough, because, he said, if it broke with his weight, he would fall to the ground, and become a cripple for life. His apprehensions were quieted by the hangman’s assurance that he might venture upon the rope with perfect confidence. And so it turned out, for it was, as American speculators would say, a “spot” transaction. For examples in the early years of the eighteenth century, the following will suffice; they show how thick the gibbets were near London.