In the striking passage, which has been quoted in full in a former chapter, page 33, Borrow conveyed the impression that “England, in general so kind and bountiful,” was guilty of disgraceful conduct in her treatment of the French prisoners, and that the suppression of the illicit straw-plait trade was associated with ruthless inroads into the prison accompanied by acts of callous cruelty. George Borrow’s father, Thomas Borrow, a Lieutenant in the West Norfolk Militia, was quartered at Norman Cross from July 1811 to April 1813. His little son George, born in 1803, spent his ninth and tenth years in the barracks, and in those years he received the impressions which led him to publish this passage forty years later. By a curious coincidence the agent, who, during the two years in which the child was making his personal observations, practically ruled the Depot, and carried out the necessary steps to suppress the traffic in straw plait, had his record cut in stone at the actual time when the events recorded in _Lavengro_ took place. On the wall of St. Peter’s Church, Yaxley, is a marble tablet with this legend: “Inscribed at the desire and the sole expense of the French Prisoners of War at Norman Cross to the memory of Captain John Draper, who for the last eighteen months of his life was Agent to the Depot, in testimony of their esteem and gratitude for his humane attention to their comfort during that too short period, he died Feb. 23, 1813, aged 53 years.” Was ever a calumny more absolutely disproved than is this aspersion of George Borrow’s upon the fair fame of his country, by the testimony of the very persons whom he said she had maltreated and whose evidence, cut in stone at their desire and sole expense at the very time the boy was in the barracks, appeals to us from that marble slab? This manufacture of straw plait went on not only at Norman Cross, but in the other prisons, the manufacturers being no doubt assisted by all their comrades in captivity to elude the efforts of the authorities to stop the traffic. The following amusing incident, narrated in Penny’s _Traditions of Perth_, is retold by Mr. William Sievwright: {144}