" rejoined his Lordship, "and I do assure you, brother, it is
not such a trifle as you represent!"

{86}

One cannot refrain from expressing a lingering sense of regret over the
last of its kind, whether of the last of the Mohicans, or the last
minstrel. The parish of Meldreth, I relieve, stands alone in the
Cambridgeshire side of the Royston district as still possessing the
visible framework of its old Parish Stocks, thanks to the commendable
interest taken in the preservation of old time memorials by Mr. George
Sandys, of Royston, by whom the Meldreth Stocks were some time ago
"restored," or, rather, the original pieces were brought more securely
together into one visible whole. The parish of Meldreth, too, affords,
I believe, one of the latest, if not the latest, instances of placing a
person in the stocks, when, some forty or fifty years ago, a man was
"stocked" for brawling in Church or some such misbehaviour. These
stocks, when they were renovated by Mr. Sandys, had lost the upper part
which completed the process of fastening an offender in them, but such
as they then were will be seen in the illustration on the opposite
page, which is reproduced from an excellent photograph taken by Mr. F.
R. Hinkins, of Royston. The original upper part has since been found
and placed in position by Mr. A. Jarman, of Meldreth.

[Illustration: THE OLD PARISH STOCKS AT MELDRETH.]

Some other things deserve to be mentioned as old penalties besides
actual punishment for crimes. One of these was the penalty for _felo
de se_, so well described by Hood in his punning verses on Faithless
Nelly Gray and Ben Battle, the soldier bold, who hung himself, and--

A dozen men sat on his corpse,
To find out how he died;
And they buried Ben at four cross-roads,
With a stake in his inside.

In 1779, John Stanford, who hung himself at the Red Lion, Kneesworth,
was found to be a _felo de se_, and was "ordered to be buried in a
cross-road."

In 1765, the coroner's inquest who sat upon the body of one, Howard, a
schoolmaster of Litlington, who, "after shooting Mr. Whedd, of
Fowlmere, cut his own throat," found a verdict of _felo de se_, upon
which he was ordered to be buried in the high cross-way, but whether a
stake was placed through the body, either in this or the Kneesworth
case, is not stated. The custom of burying a _felo de se_ at four
cross-roads continued long after the barbarous and senseless indignity
of driving a s