Eighteenth Century Waifs

As to the circumstances that have been raked together, I have nothing to observe; but that all circumstances whatsoever are precarious, and have been but too frequently found lamentably fallible; even the strongest have failed. They may rise to the utmost degree of probability, yet they are but probability still. Why should I name to your Lordship the two Harrisons, recorded in Dr. Howel, who both suffered upon circumstances, because of the sudden disappearance of their lodger, who was in credit, had contracted debts, borrowed money, and went off unseen, and returned again a great many years after their execution. Why name the intricate affair of Jaques du Moulin under King Charles II., related by a gentleman who was counsel for the Crown. And why the unhappy Coleman, who suffered innocent, though convicted upon positive evidence, and whose children perished for want, because the world uncharitably believed the father guilty. Why mention the perjury of Smith, incautiously admitted king’s evidence; who, to screen himself, equally accused Fainlotte and Loveday of the murder of Dunn; the first of whom, in 1749, was executed at Winchester; and Loveday was about to suffer at Reading, had not Smith been proved perjured, to the satisfaction of the court, by the surgeon of Gosport Hospital.

Now, my Lord, having endeavoured to show that the whole of this process is altogether repugnant to every part of my life; that it is inconsistent with my condition of health about that time; that no rational inference can be drawn that a person is dead who suddenly disappears; that hermitages were the constant repositories of the bones of the recluse; that the proofs of this are well authenticated; that the revolution in religion, or the fortunes of war, has mangled, or buried, the dead; the conclusion remains, perhaps no less reasonably, than impatiently, wished for. I, last, after a year’s confinement, equal to either fortune, put myself upon the candour, the justice, and the humanity of your Lordship, and upon yours, my countrymen, gentlemen of the jury.’

It will be seen from this elaborate defence that it must have been written long before his trial, and before his hopes of acquittal were crushed by the appearance of Houseman in the witness-box to give evidence against him; for he did not attempt to discredit his evidence, nor did he attempt to shake his testimony by cross-examination, and he must have anticipated the result. The judge summed up carefully; he recapitulated the evidence, and showed how Houseman’s testimony was confirmed by the other witnesses; and, taking Aram’s defence, he pointed out that he had alleged nothing that could invalidate the positive evidence against him. The jury, without leaving the court, returned a verdict of ‘Guilty,’ and the judge pronounced the awful sentence of the law. Aram had behaved with great firmness and dignity during the whole of his trial, and he heard his conviction, and his doom, with profound composure, leaving the bar with a smile upon his countenance.

In those days the law allowed but little time for appeal. Aram was tried, convicted, and sentenced on Friday, the 3rd of August, 1759, and he had to die on the following Monday – only two whole days of life being allowed him. Those days must have been days of exquisite torture to him, when he thought of the upturned faces of the mob, all fixing their gaze upon him, yelling at, and execrating him, and we can scarcely wonder at his attempting to commit suicide. On the Monday morning, when the clergyman came to visit him, and at his request to administer the Sacrament to him, he was astonished to find Aram stretched on the floor of his cell in a pool of blood. He had managed to secrete a razor, and had cut the veins of his arms in two places. Surgeons were sent for, and they brought him back to life, when he was put into the cart and led to execution. Arrived at the gallows, he was asked if he had any speech to make, and he replied in the negative. He was then hanged, and, when dead, his body was cut down, put in a cart, taken to Knaresborough, and there suspended in chains, on a gibbet which was erected on Knaresborough forest, south or south-east of the Low Bridge, on the right hand side going thence to Plumpton. It was taken down in 1778, when the forest was enclosed.

He left his latest thoughts in writing, for, on the table in his cell, was found a paper on which was written,

‘What am I better than my fathers? To die is natural and necessary. Perfectly sensible of this, I fear no more to die than I did to be born. But the manner of it is something which should, in my opinion, be decent and manly. I think I have regarded both these points. Certainly nobody has a better right to dispose of man’s life than himself; and he, not others, should determine how. As for any indignities offered to anybody, or silly reflections on my faith and morals, they are (as they were) things indifferent to me. I think, though, contrary to the common way of thinking; I wrong no man by this, and I hope it is not offensive to that eternal being who formed me and the world; and as by this I injure no man, no man can be reasonably offended. I solicitously recommend myself to the eternal and almighty Being, the God of Nature, if I have done amiss. But perhaps I have not, and I hope this thing will never be imputed to me. Though I am now stained by malevolence, and suffer by prejudice, I hope to rise fair and unblemished. My life was not polluted, my morals irreproachable, and my opinions orthodox.

‘I slept soundly till three o’clock, awak’d, and then writ these lines.

‘“Come, pleasing Rest, eternal Slumber fall;
Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all;
Calm and compos’d my soul her journey takes,
No guilt that troubles, and no heart that aches.
Adieu! thou sun, all bright like her arise;
Adieu! fair friends, and all that’s good and wise.”’

Aram never made any regular confession of his guilt – but in a letter he wrote to the vicar of Knaresborough, in which he gives his autobiography, he says, ‘Something is expected as to the affair upon which I was committed, to which I say, as I mentioned in my examination, that all the plate of Knaresborough, except the watches and rings, were in Houseman’s possession; as for me, I had nothing at all. My wife knows that Terry had the large plate, and that Houseman himself took both that and the watches, at my house, from Clark’s own hands; and, if she will not give this in evidence for the town, she wrongs both that and her own conscience; and, if it is not done soon, Houseman will prevent her. She likewise knows that Terry’s wife had some velvet, and, if she will, can testify it. She deserves not the regard of the town, if she will not. That part of Houseman’s evidence, wherein he said I threatened him, was absolutely false; for what hindered him, when I was so long absent and far distant? I must need observe another thing to be perjury in Houseman’s evidence, in which he said he went home from Clark; whereas he went straight to my house, as my wife can also testify, if I be not believed.’

The contemporary accounts of his trial, whether published in York or London, have the following:

‘Aram’s sentence was a just one, and he submitted to it with that stoicism he so much affected; and the morning after he was condemned, he confessed the justness of it to two clergymen (who had a licence from the judge to attend him), by declaring that he murdered Clark. Being asked by one of them what his motive was for doing that abominable action, he told them, ‘he suspected Clark of having an unlawful commerce with his wife; that he was persuaded at the time, when he committed the murder, he did right, but, since, he had thought it wrong.’

‘After this, pray,’ said Aram, ‘what became of Clark’s body, if Houseman went home (as he said upon my trial) immediately on seeing him fall?’

One of the clergymen replied, ‘I’ll tell you what became of it. You and Houseman dragged it into the cave, stripped and buried it there; brought away his clothes, and burnt them at your own house.’

To which he assented. He was asked whether Houseman did not earnestly press him to murder his wife, for fear she should discover the business they had been about. He hastily replied,

‘He did, and pressed me several times to do it.’

Aram’s wife lived some years after his execution; indeed, she did not die until 1774. She lived in a small house near Low Bridge, within sight of her husband’s gibbet; and here she sold pies, sausages, &c. It is said that she used to search under the gibbet for any of her husband’s bones that might have fallen, and then bury them.

Aram, by his wife, had six children, who survived their childhood – three sons and three daughters. All these children, save one, Sally, took after their mother; but Sally resembled her father, both physically and mentally. She was well read in the classics, and Aram would sometimes put his scholars to the blush, by having Sally in their class. Her father was very fond of her, and she was living with him at Lynn when he was arrested, and she clung to him when in prison at York. On his death, she went to London, and, after a time, she married, and, with her husband, kept a public-house on the Surrey side of Westminster Bridge.

Houseman went back to Knaresborough, where he abode until his death. He was naturally mobbed, and never dared stir out in the day time, but sometimes slunk out at night. Despised and detested by all, his life must have been a burden to him, and his punishment in this world far heavier than Aram was called upon to bear.

REDEMPTIONERS

Slavery, properly so called, appears to have been from the earliest ages, and in almost every country, the condition of a large portion of the human race; the weakest had ever to serve the strong – whether the slave was a captive in battle, or an impecunious debtor unable to satisfy the claims of his creditor, save with his body. Climate made no difference. Slavery existed in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in our own ‘right little, tight little island,’ our early annals show that a large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon population was in a state of slavery. These unfortunate bondsmen, who were called theows, thrœls, and esnes,[26 - The esne was a man of the servile class, a poor mercenary, serving for hire, or for his land, but was not of so low a rank as the other classes.] were bought and sold with land, and were classed in the inventory of their lord’s wealth, with his sheep, swine, and oxen, and were bequeathed by will, precisely as we now dispose of our money, or furniture.

The condition of the Anglo-Saxon slaves was very degraded indeed; their master might put them in bonds, might whip them, nay, might even brand them, like cattle, with his own distinguishing mark, a state of things which existed until Alfred the Great enacted some laws, whereby the time of the servitude of these unhappy people was limited to six years, and the institution of slavery received such a blow, that it speedily became a thing of the past. They were no longer slaves, but redemptioners, i. e., they had the hope of redemption from servitude, and the law gave them the power to enforce their freedom.

We have only to turn to the pages of holy writ to find slavery flourishing in rank luxuriance in the time of the patriarchs, and before the birth of Moses. Euphemistically described in Scripture history as servants, they were mostly unconditional and perpetual slaves. They were strangers, either taken prisoners in war or purchased from the neighbouring nations; but the Jews also had a class of servants who only were in compulsory bondage for a limited time, and they were men of their own nation.

These were men who, by reason of their poverty, were obliged to give their bodies in exchange for the wherewithal to support them, or they were insolvent debtors, and thus sought to liquidate their indebtedness, or men who had committed a theft, and had not the means of making the double, or fourfold, restitution that the law required. Their thraldom was not perpetual, they might be redeemed, and, if not redeemed, they became free on the completion of their seventh year of servitude.

Exodus, chap. 21, vv. 2-6. ‘If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children: I will not go out free: then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door-post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve for ever.’

Here, then, we have a redemptioner, one whose servitude was not a hopeless one, and we find this limited bondage again referred to in Leviticus, chap. 25, vv. 39, 40, 41.

‘And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee, thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bond servant: but as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee. And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.’

Here in England we are accustomed to look upon the slave from one point of view only, as an unhappy being of a different race and colour to ourselves, few of us knowing that there has been a time (and that not so very long ago) when members of our own nation, so utterly forlorn and miserable from the rude buffetings Fortune had given them in their way through the world, have been glad to sell their bodies for a time, to enable them to commence afresh the struggle for existence, in another land, and, perchance, under more favourable circumstances.

In ‘his Majesty’s plantations’ of Virginia, Maryland, and New England, and in the West Indies, these unfortunates were first called servants, and as such are officially described; but in America in later times they received the appellation of redemptioners, a name by which they were certainly called in the middle of this century, for in Dorsey’s ‘Laws of Maryland,’ published in 1840, we find an Act[27 - An Act relative to German and Swiss redemptioners.] (cap. 226) was passed in 1817 to alleviate the condition of these poor people. The preamble sets forth, ‘Whereas it has been found that German and Swiss emigrants, who for the discharge of the debt contracted for their passage to this country are often obliged to subject themselves to temporary servitude, are frequently exposed to cruel and oppressive impositions by the masters of the vessels in which they arrive, and likewise by those to whom they become servants,’ &c.

It is impossible to fix any date when this iniquitous traffic first began. It arose, probably, from the want of labourers in the plantations of our colonies in their early days, and the employment of unscrupulous agents on this side to supply their needs in this respect. A man in pecuniary difficulties in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries was indeed in woeful plight: a gaol was his certain destination, and there he might rot his life away, cut off from all hope of release, unless death came mercifully to his relief. All knew of the horrors of a debtor’s prison, and, to escape them, an able-bodied man had recourse to the dreadful expedient of selling himself into bondage, for a term of years, in one of the plantations, either in America or the West Indies, or he would believe the specious tales of the ‘kidnappers,’ as they were called, who would promise anything, a free passage, and a glorious life of ease and prosperity in a new land.

Thoroughly broken down, wretched, and miserable, his thoughts would naturally turn towards a new country, wherein he might rehabilitate himself, and, in an evil hour, he would apply to some (as we should term it) emigration agent, who would even kindly advance him a trifle for an outfit. The voyage out would be an unhappy experience, as the emigrants would be huddled together, with scant food, and, on his arrival at his destination, he would early discover the further miseries in store for him; for, immediately on landing, or even before he left the ship, his body would be seized as security for passage money, which had, in all probability, been promised him free, and for money lent for his outfit; and, having no means of paying either, utterly friendless, and in a strange country, he would be sold to slavery for a term of years to some planter who would pay the debt for him.

Having obtained his flesh and blood at such a cheap rate, his owner would not part with him lightly, and it was an easy thing to arrange matters so that he was always kept in debt for clothes and tobacco, &c., in order that he never should free himself. It was a far cry to England, and with no one to help him, or to draw public attention to his case, the poor wretch had to linger until death mercifully released him from his bondage; his condition being truly deplorable, as he would be under the same regulations as the convicts, and one may be very sure that their lot was not enviable in those harsh and merciless times. It was not for many years, until the beginning of this century, that the American laws took a beneficial turn in favour of these unhappy people; and it was then too late, for the institution of redemptioners died a speedy death, owing to the influx of free emigration.

One of the earliest notices of these unfortunates is in a collection of Old Black letter ballads, in the British Museum, where there is one entitled, ‘The Trappan’d Maiden, or the Distressed Damsel,’ (c. 22, e. 2)/186 in which are depicted some of the sorrows which were undergone by these unwilling emigrants, at that time. The date, as nearly as can be assigned to it, is about 1670.

The Girl was cunningly trapan’d,
Sent to Virginny from England;
Where she doth Hardship undergo,
There is no cure, it must be so;
But if she lives to cross the main,
She vows she’ll ne’er go there again.

Give ear unto a Maid
That lately was betray’d,
And sent into Virginny, O:
In brief I shall declare,
What I have suffered there,
When that I was weary, O.

When that first I came
To this Land of Fame,
Which is called Virginny, O:
The Axe and the Hoe
Have wrought my overthrow,
When that I was weary, O.

Five years served I
Under Master Guy,
In the land of Virginny, O:
Which made me for to know
Sorrow, Grief, and Woe,
When that I was weary, O.

When my Dame says, Go,
Then must I do so,