228 WEYMOUTH AND THE GREAT CIVIL WAR. 



Chiles denied the charge in toto. The body was not 

 recovered, and, in fact, conflicting evidence was given to 

 show that Courtney was still alive. The wife's statement, 

 however, was so circumstantial, that the Justices were 

 greatly puzzled, and had the case under consideration for 

 four months. At length, the prisoner was committed to 

 the Dorset Assizes, for trial. Our curiosity as to the upshot 

 of this seventeenth century trial cannot be gratified, for no 

 report appears to be extant. Let us hope that justice was 

 ultimately done. This was a cause celebre, and the alleged 

 ghastly murder of the man with the " flaxen hair and yellow 

 beard " must have been remembered in Weymouth for many 

 a long year.* 



THE FAT CAPTAIN OF HORSE. 



We now turn for a moment to an entirely different scene. 

 Some time after the Civil War had ceased and the townsmen 

 had quieted down, George Fox, the celebrated founder of 

 the Quakers, visited Melcombe and held a meeting with the 

 Quakers, who had become fairly numerous here. He met 

 with a remarkable man amongst the Parliamentary troops 

 quartered in the town. Fox speaks of him as a Captain of 

 Horse. When Fox left the place, they rode together up the 

 old Ridgeway road to Dorchester, and a very strange pair 

 they were. Fox says, in his well-known " Journal," f 

 " This Captain was the fattest, merriest man, the most cheer- 

 ful and the most given to laughter that ever I met with." 

 Fox, the grave Quaker, therefore felt bound to admonish 

 him " to come to sobriety ; " but, at first, to little effect, 

 for Fox naively adds, " And yet, he would presently laugh 

 at anything he saw." What a splendid character this fat, 



* Weymouth Corporation Record (formerly Sherren Papers), 245, p. 78. 

 t Journal of George Fox, by \V. Armstead, Vol. 1, 223, 



