LITTLEPORT RIOTS 123 



dominions. It was not many years before that its awful 

 effects had been manifested in the Littleport riots, which 

 terminated in capital punishment being inflicted on five 

 misguided human beings, and in the deportation of many 

 others for the same crime. One man, I remember, re- 

 turned on my coach after an absence of eight years, having 

 received an unconditional pardon ; and I shall not readily 

 forget the violent ebullition of the poor fellow's feelings 

 when informed by my horse-keeper that his wife, to whom 

 he was hastening in the fulness of his heart, had married 

 in his absence. 



Neither can I omit, in the first year of my residence at 

 Ely, the execution of a man for murder, under the most 

 cold-blooded circumstances, on the spot marked by the 

 crime ; and, as if to show what little progress knowledge 

 had made in this part of our island, his body was gibbetted 

 in sight of the turnpike road — the last of such inhuman 

 exhibitions. Some two or three years afterwards the late 

 Sir Robert Peel, having to post that road on his way to a 

 mansion he had hired near Downham, in Norfolk, had the 

 disgusting object removed. 



It is still M'ithin the memory of man that the Fens, in 

 this district in particular, were under water three parts 

 of the year ; that many of the inhabitants lived chiefly by 

 fowling and fishing ; and it was not till after the energies 

 and judgment of the Bedford Level Corporation had 

 rendered the land available for agricultural purposes, 

 that there v/as any road upon which a stage-coach could 

 travel ; and it has since, by means of improved and im- 

 proving drainage, been made most productive. Conse- 

 quently, a certain class have suddenly, as it were, become 



