cumstances with which they were committed.

Richard Parvin was master of a public-house at Portsmouth, a man of dull
and dogmatic disposition, who continually denied his having been in any
manner concerned with these people, though the evidence against him at
his trial was as full and as direct as possibly could have been
expected, and he himself evidently proved to have been on the spot where
the violences committed by the other prisoners were transacted. In
answer to this, he said that he was not with them, though indeed he was
upon the forest, for which he gave this reason. He had, he said, a very
handsome young wench who lived with him, and for that reason being
admired by many of his customers, she took it in her head one day to run
away. He hearing that she had fled across the forest, pursued her, and
in that pursuit calling at the house of Mr. Parford, who keeps an
alehouse in the forest, this man being an evidence against the other
Blacks, took him it seems into the number, though as he said, he could
fully have cleared himself if he had had any money to have sent for some
witnesses out of Berkshire. But the mayor of Portsmouth seizing, as soon
as he was apprehended, all his goods, put his family into great distress
and whether he could have found them or not, hindered his being able to
produce any witnesses at his trial.

He persevered in these professions of his innocency to the very last,
still hoping for a reprieve, and not only feeding himself with such
expectations while in prison, but also gazed earnestly when at the tree,
in hopes that pardon would be brought him, until the cart drew away and
extinguished life and the desire of life together.

Edward Elliot, a boy of about seventeen years of age, whose father was a
tailor at a village between Petworth and Guildford, was the next who
received sentence of death with Parvin. The account he gave of his
coming into this society has something very odd in it, and which gives a
fuller idea of the strange whims which possessed these people. The boy
said that about a year before his being apprehended, thirty or forty men
met him in the county of Surrey and hurried him away. He who appeared to
be the chief of them told him that he enlisted him in the service of the
King of the Blacks, in pursuance of which he was to disguise his face,
obey orders of whatsoever kind they were, such as breaking down fish
ponds, burning woods, shooting deer, taking also an oath to be