On November 16, 1766, Thomas Parker called on his way from Penrith Market at a small inn at Carlton. Being somewhat the worse for drink,[67] the landlord urged him to remain, but the shaggy sot pressed on his way, and was murdered the same night. The affair caused an extraordinary local interest among a population who had not forgotten the shocking incidents of the punishments for the Rebellion of twenty years before. The poor muddled man had been beaten to death by one Thomas Nicholson, after a violent struggle with the assassin. The murderer, upon strong circumstantial evidence, was sentenced to be executed, and his body to be hung in chains near where the crime was committed. It so hung for many years, slowly dropping to pieces, until on one stormy night the gibbet was blown down. Shortly after some humane persons from Edenhall came and gathered the desolate bones together, wrapped them in a winnowing-sheet--it sounds like an episode from the Apocrypha, like a good deed of Tobit--and laid them in a grave. The spot was long after distinguished by the letters, large and legible, deeply cut in the turf, “T. P. M.,” signifying “here Thomas Parker was murdered.”[68] The hanging in chains of a man named Corbet, of Tring, who murdered Richard Holt in 1773, is noteworthy, as the last instance of gibbeting in the county of Buckingham.[69] A notorious highwayman, John Whitfield, was executed and gibbeted on Barrock, near Wetheral, Cumberland, about the year 1777. It is said that he was gibbeted alive, and that the guard of a passing mail-coach put him out of his misery by shooting him. If this were true the guard was clearly guilty of murder. We shall have occasion to revert to this question. Later, a sergeant was reduced to the ranks for shooting at the dead body in chains of Jerry Abershaw, a notorious brigand, on Wimbledon Common.[70] In the year 1785 the Rev. Thomas Kerrich made sketches of two men hanging in chains upon one gibbet on Brandon Sands, Suffolk. At the present day all other record both of the men (May and Tybald), their crimes, and their punishment, has, like the coral worm of the completed reef, utterly passed away; all has succumbed to “the tooth of time, and razure of oblivion.” The gibbet post is shown bound with iron bands to prevent cutting down. [Illustration: GIBBET ON BRANDON SANDS, 1785. (_From a sketch by the Rev. Thomas Kerrich._)] About the middle of the last century three men who robbed the north mail near the Chevin, over against Belper, were all executed and hung in chains on one gibbet on the top of the mountain. “Now then, you three, hang there, and be a sign.”[71] It is recorded that a friendly hand set fire one night to the gibbet which, with all three bodies well saturated with pitch, was burnt to ashes, leaving only the irons and chains remaining.[72]