the town came there, had a grisly sound in the name.
The Hindhead murder has grown from a sordid case of robbery and killing
into one of the great crimes of English local history. Nothing would
have seemed less likely to the murderers. Probably not one of them could
read or write; perhaps any sensible calculation of the chances of escape
was beyond them; possibly they never planned the murder at all. Their
crime, in a sense, was paltry; if it had never been discovered, there
would have been no further consequences; no one but the murdered man, so
far as can be told, was injured; the man was never missed nor owned by a
friend. The murder of a king reshapes history; an assassinated Minister
may change a Constitution; the killing of this man, apparently, mattered
to no single living soul. Yet his murderers, in all their clumsiness and
ignorance, contrived a crime which should be talked of daily for a
century, and should have its separate, distinct record in stone when a
thousand plots and passions of regicides and usurpers should be as clean
forgotten as if their record had never stained blank paper.

Where is the permanent quality? Perhaps it is murder isolated, set
exactly in the light which means and belongs to murder, in the
atmosphere in which all imagination of murderers moves and hides. It was
at night, it was in a wild place, with the horror of a great height
about it; the corpse was stripped, the man was nameless. He was a
sailor, walking from London to Portsmouth on September 23rd, 1786, to
look for a job. He had money in his pocket; at Esher he fell in with
three men, also on the road to Portsmouth, but without money; he paid
for food and drink and lodging for them, and he was last seen alive with
them at the Red Lion near Thursley. Perhaps the men were followed--one
account says they were watched--perhaps the finding of the body was by
chance. Two cottagers, coming after them over the highest stretch of the
hill, saw below them, white in the dim light, on the slope of the Punch
Bowl round which the road runs, the dead body as they thought of a
sheep. One climbed down and saw what it was. Pursuers rushed down the
road at Sheet, near Petersfield, the three were caught, trying to sell
the dead man's clothes. They were tried at Kingston, and hanged in
chains on the highest point of Hindhead; and there their bodies swung in
the wind over every coach that drove from London to Portsmouth.

The old Portsmouth road ran