But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make so sure of your barley,” became proverbial. All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away. “Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet. There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the “Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night, several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow beneath the gruesome object. “How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close together, and sorry they had come. “Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a raving maniac. XVIII Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood, there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman city of _Uriconium_, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of _Uriconium_,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D. 48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years, and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain. _Uriconium_ was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had remained were all massacred. [Illustration: THE “OLD WALL.”]