ced her to
wear, and to ride cross-legged with pistols before her.

In this dress they brought her to Parvin's house upon the forest, where
they dined upon a haunch of venison, feasted merrily and after dinner
sent out two of their companions to kill more deer, not in the King's
Forest, but in Waltham Chase, belonging to the Bishop of Winchester. One
of these two persons they called their king, and the other they called
Lyon. Neither of these brothers objected anything, either to the truth
of the evidence given against them, or the justice of that sentence
which had passed upon them, only one insinuating that the evidence would
not have been so strong against him and Ansell, if it had not been for
running away with the witness's wife, which so provoked him that they
were sure they should not escape when he was admitted a witness.

These like the rest were hard to be persuaded that the things they had
committed were any crimes in the eyes of God. They said deer were wild
beasts, and they did not see why the poor had not as good a right to
them as the rich. However, as the Law condemned them to suffer, they
were bound to submit, and in consequence of that notion, behaved
themselves very orderly, decently and quietly, while under sentence.

James Ansell, _alias_ Stephen Philips, the seventh and last of these
unhappy persons, was a man addicted to a worse and more profligate life
than any of the rest had ever been; for he had held no settled
employment, but had been a loose disorderly person, concerned in all
sorts of wickedness for many years, both at Portsmouth, Guildford, and
other country towns, as well as at London. Deer were not the only things
that he had dealt in; stealing and robbing on the highway had been
formerly his employment, and in becoming a Black, he did not as the
others ascend in wickedness, but came down on the contrary, a step
lower. Yet this criminal as his offences were greater, so his sense of
them was much stronger than in any of the rest, excepting Kingshell, for
he gave over all manner of hopes of life and all concerns about it as
soon as he was taken.

Yet even he had no notion of making discoveries, unless they might be
beneficial to himself, and though he owned the knowledge of twenty
persons who were notorious offenders in the same kind, he absolutely
refused to name them, since such naming would not procure himself a
pardon; talking to him of the duty of doing justice was beating the air.