take through the body was discontinued, and persons still
living remember burials at such spots as the entrance to Melbourn, and
at similar spots in other villages. Another penal order was for the
body to be "anatomised" after execution, as in the case of a man named
Stickwood for murdering Andrew Nunn, at Fowlmere, in 1775.

Sometimes as an alternative penalty for crimes was the system of
enlistment for the Army and Navy, with which may be coupled the
high-handed proceedings of the "Press-gang." The Press-gang {88} was
practically a recognised part of the machinery of the State. The law,
as to recruiting, sanctioned what would now be considered most
tyrannical proceedings; justices of the peace were directed to make "a
speedy and effectual levy of such able-bodied men as are not younger
than seventeen nor more than forty-five, nor Papists." The means for
enforcing this, not only along river-sides, but often in inland country
villages, was often brutal, and led to determined resistance and
sometimes loss of life. There is a story in Cornwall of a bevy of
girls dressing themselves up as sailors, and acting the part of the
Press-gang so well that they actually put their own sweethearts to
flight from the quarries in which they were working!

The dread of compulsory service was so great that the lot might fall
upon men to whom the name of war was a terror. One case of this kind
occurred in a village near Royston in which two men were drawn to
proceed to Ireland for service, and one of them actually died of the
shock and fright and sudden wrench from old associations, after
reaching Liverpool on his way to Ireland!

On the subject of pressing for the services, the following
characteristic entry occurs in the Royston parish books for the year
1790:--

"Ordered that the Wife of March Brown be permitted to leave the House
as she says her husband is Pressed and gone to sea, and that she came
to the parish for a few clothes only, as she can get her living in
London by earning two shillings a Day by making Breeches for Rag fair."

Though the stocks and the gallows may seem a long way apart, yet they
were really very near in the degrees of crime which linked them, and
what now would appear a minor offence, had inevitably linked with it
the "awful sentence of the law."

At the Bury St. Edmunds Assizes, in 1790, 14 persons received sentence
of death. The extraordinary number of persons who were hung as the
Assizes came