By the Bev. Canon J. E. Jackson, P.S.A. 



43 



sitting behind him on a pillion^ after the style of those days, all the 

 way from Staffordshire to Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire. They had 

 many very narrow escapes. She afterwards married Mr. Edward 

 Nicholas, one of a very old Wilts family, and lived and died at 

 Manning-ford Braose, beyond Devizes, where there is in that Church 

 a monument with an inscription recording this event. 



Akin to female bravery is female audacity ; and of this there are 

 two or three cases on record, relating, as might be expected, to 

 persons of a lower class of life than those which have been mentioned. 

 But the spirit is the same ; though the circumstances less dignified. 



In military history there are several instances of women having 

 contrived to pass themselves as men and serve as soldiers in the 

 army. About one hundred years ago, a young Wiltshire woman, 

 having dressed herself in man's clothes, was taken by a press-gang 

 at Salisbury to serve in the fleet, at the beginning of the American 

 War. She remained in the service till August, 1780, when she was 

 taken up for a street row as one of the principals in a pugilistic 

 combat, and discovered. She had assumed the name of John Davis, 

 alias something else. Now all this is low enough, but had this 

 woman been born under a more fortunate star, Nature had qualified 

 her to be a Joan of Arc. 



About the same date, one Mary Abraham, alias Mary Sandall, 

 of Baverstock, near Salisbury, actually assumed the dress and equip- 

 ment of a mounted highwayman. She practised the " stand and 

 deliver" business in that neighbourhood once too often, and was 

 tried at the assizes in 1779. What rendered her daring the more 

 remarkable was, that she took up the calling of a highway-woman 

 just after the execution of the notorious Thomas Boulter, of Poulshot, 

 who had been the terror of the county, and whose exploits are not 

 quite forgotten yet. 



A third instance of female audacity — or rather, this time, of 

 impudence — is that of Anne Simms, of Studley Green, near Bremhill. 

 She was a most noted poacher, and till past the age of a hundred 

 years often used to boast of having sold at gentlemen's kitchen- 

 doors fish taken out of their own ponds. Almost to the last she 

 would walk to and from Bo wood, about three miles ftom Studley 



