--

"Come, pleasing rest, eternal slumber fall,
Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all;
Calm and composed, my soul her journey takes,
No guilt that troubles, and no heart that aches;
Adieu! thou sun, all bright like her arise;
Adieu! fair friends, and all that's good and wise."

On August 6th, 1759, he was hanged at York, and afterwards his body was
conveyed to Knaresborough Forest, where it was gibbeted.

Hornsea people are sometimes called "Hornsea Pennels," after a notorious
pirate and smuggler, named Pennel, who murdered his captain and sunk his
ship near to the place. He was tried and executed in London for the
crimes, and his body, bound round with iron hoops, was sent to Hornsea,
in a case marked "glass." The corpse, in 1770, was hung in chains on the
north cliff. Long ago the cliff with its gibbet has been washed away by
the sea.

On the night of June 8th, 1773, a man named Corbet, a rat-catcher and
chimney-sweep, living at Tring, entered down the chimney the house of
Richard Holt, of Bierton, Buckinghamshire, and murdered him in his
bed-chamber. For this crime Corbet was hanged and gibbeted in a field
not far distant from the house where the murder was committed. The
gibbet served as a gallows. A correspondent of the _Bucks Herald_ says
in 1795 he visited Bierton Feast, and at that period the gibbet was
standing, with the skull of the murderer attached to the irons. Some
years later the irons were worn away by the action of the swivel from
which they were suspended, fell, and were thrown into the ditch, and
lost sight of. Francis Neale, of Aylesbury, blacksmith, made the gibbet,
or as he calls it in his account the gib, and his bill included entries
as follow:--

L s. d.
"July 23, A.D. 1773. To 6lb. Spikes 0 2 3
" " Iron for Gib-post 0 16 4
" " Nails for the Gib 0 4 0
" " 3 hund'd tenter Hooks 0 3 0
" " The Gib 5 0 0"

These figures were copied from the original accounts by the late Robert
Gibbs, the painstaking local chronicler of Aylesbury. This is
understood to have been the last gibbet erected in Buckinghamshire.[11]

Terror and indignation were felt by the inhabitants of the quiet midland
town of Derby on Christmas day, in the year 1775, as the news spread
through t