[Sidenote: _HUMANE JURIES_] They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801, for stealing a horse, and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee, who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed loopholes for escape, and so when the _straw_-rick, to which a prisoner was charged with setting fire, was proved to have been _hay_, he was found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they used to find £5 and £10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few shillings, according as the case required. The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of 1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam machinery, then [Illustration: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.] [Sidenote: _ALDERBURY_]