any other for any wages to come near the stinking carcases, but they
themselves were compelled to do so vile an office." Gower, a
contemporary poet, writes as follows:--

"And so after by the Lawe
He was unto the gibbet drawe,
Where he above all other hongeth,
As to a traitor it belongeth."

Sir Robert Constable was gibbeted above the Beverley-gate, Hull, in
1537, for high treason. "On Fridaye," wrote the Duke of Norfolk, "beying
market daye at Hull, suffered and dothe hange above the highest gate of
the toune so trymmed in cheynes that I thinke his boones woll hang there
this hundrethe yere."

According to Lord Dreghorn, writing in 1774:--"The first instance of
hanging in chains is in March, 1637, in the case of Macgregor, for
theft, robbery, and slaughter; he was sentenced to be hanged in a
chenzie on the gallow-tree till his corpse rot."[9]

Philip Stanfield, in 1688, was hung in chains between Leith and
Edinburgh for the murder of his father, Sir James Stanfield. In books
relating to Scotland, Stanfield's sad story has often been told, and it
is detailed at some length in Chambers's "Domestic Annals of Scotland."

Hanging in chains was by no means rare from an early period in the
annals of England, but according to Blackstone this was no part of the
legal judgment. It was not until 1752, by an Act of 25 George II., that
gibbeting was legally recognised. After execution by this statute,
bodies were to be given to the surgeons to be dissected and anatomized,
and not to be buried without this being done. The judge might direct the
body to be hung in chains by giving a special order to the sheriff. This
Act made matters clear, and was the means of gibbeting rapidly
increasing in this country.

A gravestone in the churchyard of Merrington, in the county of Durham,
states:--

Here lies the bodies of
John, Jane, and Elizabeth, children of John and Margaret Brass,
Who were murdered the 28th day of January, 1683,
By Andrew Mills, their father's servant,
For which he was executed and hung in chains.
Reader, remember, sleeping
We were slain:
And here we sleep till we must
Rise again.
"Whoso sheddeth man's blood by man shall his blood be shed."
"Thou shalt do no murder."
Restored by subscription in 1789.

The parents of the