Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/291

 9* s. vii. APRIL 13, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Dobie (1829) in their histories of St. Giles's parish. Beyond such insufficient authority I have found none other showing that St. Giles's was ever established as the general place of executions, although twice chosen for the special executions which we will now consider.

The fields of St. Giles's are said to have been in 1414 the meeting-place of the Lollards, who had Sir John Oldcastle (styled Lord Cobham jure uxoris) as their chief. Twenty-five thou- sand of them were to meet in the fields on the night of 14 January, but when the king sallied out of the City gates with a strong array he found but eighty of the so-callea rebels. Then woe to the heretics ! We learn their fate in the chronicle of Fabyan, who was almost contemporary (d. 1511), thus :

"Sir Roger Acton, knight, Sir John Beverley, priest, a squire called Sir John Browne, and thirty- six more, after conviction of heresy and treason, were hanged and burned within the field of St. Giles."

Oldcastle escaped at this time, but, captured nearly five years afterwards, was put to death with barbarous cruelty. At the end of a long report of his trial in ' Rolls of Parliament ' /vol. iv. p. 108) is the death sentence :

"Comme Traitour au Roi & a son Roialme soit amesne k la Tour de Loundres, & d'illeoques soit treinez p'my la Citee de Loundres tanq. as novelles

furches en la paroche de Seynt Gyles hors de la barre de Vieille Temple de Loundres, & illeoques soit penduz & ars pendant."

Here the indication of place is " the new gallows [probably set up for the occasion] in the parish of St. Giles outside the bar of the Old Temple of London," i.e., the old house of the Knights Templars, which stood by the north end of Chancery Lane and more than half a mile east of St. Giles's Hospital. Redmayne, a contemporary chronicler, in ' Memorials of Henry V.' places the execu- tion "in agrum Divi Egidii." Fabyan has that " Lord Cobham was drawn unto Seynt Gyles felde, where he was hanged upon a new pair of gallows with chains, and after con- sumed with fire." John Bale (1544) says :

" The Blessed Martyr of Christ, Syr John Oldecastell,

the Lorde Cobham was drawn forth unto Saynct

Gyles Felde, where as they had set up a newe payre

of gallows then was he hanged up there by the

myddle in cheanes of yron, and so consumed alyve in the fyre."

Hall and Holinshed repeat Bale, and Stow does not vary. In all these accounts we hear only of St. Giles's Fields, which then covered a large area quite outside London, and only in the words of the Parliament Rolls do we approach to any more definite indication of the gallows site, viz., "outside the bar of

the Old Temple," which in the fields was as far away as it could be from the hospital in fact, at the opposite extremity of the area. The next execution we have to notice at St. Giles's helps our conclusion.

The long period of 168 years 1418 to 1586 passed without any execution at St. Giles's of which we have knowledge. That of 1586 had a cause of very different complexion from that of 1418, but they are alike in having the same motive for the selection of the place of death. The alleged conspiracy in both cases had been concocted in the same out-of-the- wav fields of St. Giles's ; therefore it was ordered that in those fields should retribu- tion be exacted. The name of Babington distinguishes the plot to bring Mary, Queen of Scots, to the English throne by the assassi- nation of Elizabeth ; but in the English seminary at Rheiras lay the inception of the plot, and John Ballard and John Savage were the emissaries who gained the co-opera- tion of Anthony Babington, a man of good position. Holinshed, or rather his continu- ator, now writes the contemporary record, and with painful minuteness, extending over four full pages, he relates the fearful penal- ties meted out to fourteen of the discovered miscreants. The place is thus indicated :

" A field at the upper end of Holborn, hard by the highway side to Saint Giles in the field, where was erected a pair of gallows of extraordinary height, as was that whereupon haughty Hainan was hanged for his ambition."

Camden, also contemporary, writes :

"On 20 th same month [September, 1586] (a gallows and a scaffold being set up for that purpose in S. Giles Fields, where they were wont to meet) the

first seven were hanged The next day the other

seven were drawn to the same place," &c.

John Stow and John Speed, both of the time, throw further light on this execution of 1586, by locating it in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Thus relates Stow :

" These traitors, fourteen in number, were exe- cuted in Lincoln's Inn Fields, on a stage or scaffold of timber strongly made for that purpose ; even in the place where they were used to meet and to confer on their traitorous practices, there were they hanged, bowelled, and quartered."

Then follow the names : J. Ballard, priest ; Anthony Babington, Esq. ; J. Savage, gentle- man ; and the others To us of the present day St. Giles's-in-the-Fields and Lincoln's Inn Fields seem far apart ; the distance between them is quite half a mile. But if we put out of mind the now crowded district and modern parochial divisions, and turn to Aggas's map of c. 1560, the apparent variance disappears. Between St. Giles's Hospital and Lincoln's Inn are fields, and