ATTEMPTED ESCAPES. 125 



day before they had remitted the monthly earnings to 

 the lessee of the tolls. The custom at the time I speak 

 of was to hang murderers forty-eight hours after they 

 were sentenced — they were generally tried on Friday 

 that the)' might be hanged on the Monday morning, 

 giving them a Sunday for a funeral sermon to be preached 

 to them by the chaplain of the gaol — and these three 

 criminals, who had made so gallant a dash for life and 

 liberty, were brought back to prison and hanged 

 seatndciii artei/i. 



Escapes from the gaol at Aylesbury were frequent, 

 and one especially was very boldly planned, and, if it 

 had not been discovered in time, would have led to 

 most serious consequences. One afternoon my father 

 was startled at seeing Mr. Sheriff, the governor, rushing 

 into his house, begging him to come to the gaol with all 

 the men he could collect, as he was afraid the turnkey 

 would be overpowered and half the prisoners in the 

 gaol would escape. At once from all parts of the 

 premises our men were marched off into the prison, 

 armed with a weapon of some kind, an old flint blunder- 

 buss, a ship's cutlass, or a thick stick. The prisoners in 

 the ward called the Old Gaol, the most desperate of 

 the criminals, headed by a young man named Saunders, 

 who was accused of a burglary with violence, with more 

 than twenty horse and sheep stealers, highway robbers, 

 and burglars under his command, were in possession of 

 the ward, and having taken out the wooden legs of the 

 forms and torn up their bedding to make a sort of 

 binding cord to thread the forms together into a ladder, 

 were scaling up the back of the governor's house and 



