re the
gibbeting took place, the only clue we have is given in Cole's words:
"Hanged in chains on the Great Road." There seems no road that would
so well answer this description as the North Road or Great North Road,
and, as the spot must have been somewhere within a riding distance of
Cambridge, the incident has naturally been associated with Caxton
gibbet, a half-a-mile to the north of the village of Caxton, where a
finger-post like structure, standing on a mound by the side of the
North Road, still marks the spot where the original gibbet stood.

It seems almost incredible that we have travelled so far within so
short a time! That almost within the limits of two men's lives a state
of things prevailed which permitted a corpse to be lying about by the
side of the public highway, subject now to the insults, now to the
pity, of the passer-by! Yet many persons living remember the fire-side
stories of the dreadful penalties awaiting any person who dared to
interfere with the course of the law, and remove the malefactor from
the gibbet!

Towards the end of the century the horrors of gibbeting, as illustrated
in Gatward's case, were tempered somewhat by a method of public
execution near the spot where the crime was committed, but, apparently
of sparing the victim and his friends the exposure of the body for
months afterwards till a convenient "high wind" blew it down. The
latest instance I have found of an execution of this kind by the
highway occurred in Hertfordshire, and to a Hertfordshire man. This
was James Snook, who had formerly been a contractor in the formation of
the Grand Junction Canal, but turning his attention to the "romance of
the road" was tried at the Hertfordshire Assizes in 1802 for robbing
the Tring mail. He was capitally convicted and ordered to be executed
near the place where the robbery was committed. He was executed there
a few days afterwards. The spot was, I am informed, on the Boxmoor
Common, and his grave, at the same spot, is still, or was until recent
years, marked by a head stone standing, solitary and alone to tell the
sorry tale!

Situate on the York Road, one of the greatest coach roads in England,
with open Heath on all sides, it would have been strange indeed if
Royston and the neighbourhood had not got mixed up with traditions of
Dick Turpin, and that famous ride to York in which we get a flying
vision as the horseman passes the boundaries of the two counties. The
stories