d a word,
however, which a scholar who chanced to be present observing, he stood
behind him and prompted him with the verse he was to read; but coming
towards the end, the man's thumb happened to cover the remaining words,
and so the scholar, in a low voice, said: "Take away thy thumb," which
words the man, supposing them to form part of the verse he was reading,
repeated aloud, "Take away thy thumb"--whereupon the judge ordered him
to be taken away and hanged. And in Taylor's _Wit and Mirth_ (1630): "A
fellow having his book [that is, having read a verse in the Bible] at
the sessions, was burnt in the hand, and was commanded to say: 'May God
save the King.' 'The King!' said he, 'God save my grandam, that taught
me to read; I am sure I had been hanged else.'"

The verse in the Bible which a criminal was required to read, in order
to entitle him to the "benefit of clergy" (the beginning of the 51st
Psalm, "Miserere mei"), was called the "neck-verse," because his doing
so saved his neck from the gallows. It is sometimes jestingly alluded to
in old plays. For example, in Massinger's _Great Duke of Florence_, Act
iii, sc. 1:

_Cataminta_.--How the fool stares!

_Fiorinda_.--And looks as if he were conning his neck-verse;

and in the same dramatist's play of _The Picture_:

Twang it perfectly,
As if it were your neck-verse.

In the anonymous _Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell_ (1603), Act ii,
sc. 1, we find this custom again referred to:

_Farnese_.--Ha, hah! Emulo not write and read?

_Rice_.--Not a letter, an you would hang him.

_Urcenze_.--Then he'll never be saved by his book.

In Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the moss-trooper, William of
Deloraine, assures the lady, who had warned him not to look into what he
should receive from the Monk of St. Mary's Aisle, "be it scroll or be it
book," that

"Letter nor line know I never a one,
Were't my neck-verse at Haribee"--

the place where such Border rascals were usually executed.

It was formerly the custom to sing a psalm at the gallows before a
criminal was "turned off." And there is a good story, in Zachary Gray's
notes to _Hudibras_, told of one of the chaplains of the famous
Montrose; how, being condemned in Scotland to die for attending his
master in some of his expeditions, and being upon the ladder and ordered
to select a psalm to be sung, expecting a reprieve, he named the 119th
Psalm, with which the officer attendin