worth.
Therefore having first melted them, they threw them away; but being a
little fearful of robbing in company, he took to his old method of
robbing by himself in the streets. But the first attempt he made to do
this was in the old Artillery Ground,[43] where he snatched a woman's
pocket; and she crying out raised the neighbourhood. They pursued him,
and after wounding two or three persons desperately, he was taken and
committed to his old mansions in Newgate, and being tried at the next
sessions was found guilty and from that time could not enjoy the least
hopes of life. But he continued still very obdurate, being so hardened
by a continual series of villainous actions that he seemed to have no
idea whatsoever of religion, penitence or atoning by prayers, for the
numerous villainies he had committed.

At the place of execution he said nothing to the people, only that he
was sorry he had not stayed in Carolina, because if he had, he should
never have come to be hanged, and so finished his life in the same
stupid manner in which he had lived. He was near forty years of age at
the time he suffered, which was on the 27th of June, 1720.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] This was the exercising ground of the Train Bands and the
Honourable Artillery Company. It was on the west side of
Finsbury Square.

The History of the WALTHAM BLACKS and their transactions to the death of
RICHARD PARVIN, EDWARD ELLIOT, ROBERT KINGSHELL, HENRY MARSHALL, JOHN
PINK and EDWARD PINK, and JAMES ANSELL _alias_ PHILLIPS, at Tyburn,
whose lives are also included

Such is the unaccountable folly which reigns in too great a part of the
human species, that by their own ill-deeds, they make such laws
necessary for the security of men's persons and properties, as by their
severity, unless necessity compelled them, would appear cruel and
inhuman, and doubtless those laws which we esteem barbarous in other
nations, and even some which appear so though anciently practised in our
own, had their rise from the same cause.

I am led to this observation from the folly which certain persons were
guilty of in making small insurrections for the sake only of getting a
few deer, and going on, because they found the leniency of the laws
could not punish them at present, until they grew to that height as to
ride in armed troops, blacked and disguised, in order the more to
terrify those whom they assaulted, and wherever they were denied what
they