Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/110

 a drunken debauch, passing over London Bridge, he encountered another brawl, wherein, having run at the watchman with his rapier, one blow of the bill which they carried severed his head from his trunk. The latter was cast over the parapet into the Thames, and the head was carefully packed up in a box and sent to his sisters at Wardley. It was Maria who ventured to open the package and read the sad fate of her brother from a paper which was enclosed. The skull was removed, secretly at first, but invariably it returned to the Hall, and no human power could drive it thence. It hath been riven to pieces, burnt, and otherwise destroyed; but on the subsequent day it was seen filling its wonted place. This wilful piece of mortality will not allow the little aperture in which it rests to be walled up—it remains there—whitened and bleached by the weather, looking forth from those rayless sockets upon the scenes which, when living, they had once beheld." This curious legend exists under various forms, and has been noticed by several writers, but all agree in the main facts. One account varies the place of his death, stating, in short, that Roger Downes, in the licentious spirit of the age, having abandoned himself to vicious courses, was killed by a watchman in a fray at Epsom Wells, in June 1676, and dying without issue, the family quitted Wardley. It is of this Roger Downes that Lucas speaks, when he says that, according to tradition, "while in London, in a drunken frolic, he vowed to his companions that he would kill the first man he met; then, sallying forth, he ran his sword through a poor tailor. Soon after this, being in a riot, a watchman made a stroke at him with his bill, which severed his head from his body. The head was enclosed in a box and sent to his sister, who lived at Wardley Hall. "The skull," adds the narrator, "has