A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 



at cards ; and we also read of a woman at Woburn who defrauded a boy of 

 his money by playing at a ' table with an index to it.' In 1802, at the Cow 

 Fair at Dunstable, a man was apprehended for playing at an unlawful game, 

 called ' Pricking in the Belt or Garter,' at which a Battlesden man lost 

 4 guineas. This game was earlier better known by the name ' fast and loose.* 

 It was played with a stick and a belt or string."* Vagrants were numerous, 

 among them being vagrant seamen, and persons who had been born or had 

 spent great parts of their lives abroad. In 1780, we find mention of a mail 

 robbery at Dunstable. 



When we turn to the punishments inflicted, we find a greater difference 

 between the 18th and the 19th centuries, than we do in the crimes. One of 

 the commonest punishments was that of whipping, generally administered 

 publicly, either at a cart's tail, or at a market cross, or, not infrequently, 

 through the town or village. For example, a man who had stolen brass 

 chippings, valued at lod., was ' ordered to be whipped from one end of the 

 town to the other of Dunstable between the hours of eleven and twelve.' 

 The instructions were sometimes painfully explicit. One man was to be 

 whipped ' till his body was bloody,' and another was to receive ' 50 lashes on 

 his bare back.' Women were whipped almost as frequently as men. In 

 1749 there is an item in the gaol accounts, ' For a cart and two lines to whip 

 EUzabeth Hill and Mary Erin, 5J. ; paid the Whipper, js. 6d.' When the 

 prisoner had to be conveyed from the place in which he was tried to the 

 place in which he was whipped, the expenses became heavy. For example : 

 A man had to be taken to Ampthill from Bedford, to be publicly whipped. 

 The whipping cost ioj. 6d. ; and the chaise that took him there, with 

 driver's and man's expenses, and toll-gate, cost ^i 3J. 6d. more. Again, in 

 1 801, it cost ^3 I ij. to take a man to Luton to be publicly whipped ; in 

 18 1 3 it cost j(^4 nj. to take two men to Woburn to be whipped. In the 

 same year a man was whipped at the cart's tail, 100 yds., in Bedford, at the 

 cost of ^i IS. Branding in the hand was a punishment frequently inflicted 

 upon both men and women. The pillory was sometimes called into requisition, 

 in addition to imprisonment. In 1779 two men were taken to Leighton 

 Buzzard to be pilloried, the cost, including chair, guard, and expenses, being 

 ^2. In 178 1 a judgement of 'outlawry' was pronounced against a man 

 indicted for felony. 



Executions were frequent ; not seldom several criminals were hanged 

 at the same time. It appears that the gallows was a permanent part 

 of the equipment of the gaol, as there are entries in the records of the cost 

 of repairs. It is scarcely a part of the local history, but it deserves to be 

 mentioned that the notorious Rev. William Dodd (author of the long-popular 

 Beauties of Shakespeare, and a friend of Chesterfield), who was hanged in IJJJ, 

 at Newgate, for forgery, was at the time vicar of HocklifFe. It is also 

 interesting to note that a gibbet which stood near Puddle Hill (in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Houghton Regis) was not destroyed until 1803. Towards the 

 latter part of the century, sentences of capital punishment for felony and 

 grand larceny were frequently commuted into transportation. The number 

 of transportations, generally for seven years, though often for longer periods, 



"* It is mentioned by Shakespeare : ' Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguil'd me to the very 

 heart of loss' (Ant. and Cleop. iv, 10) ; Ben Jonson, Butler in Hudibras, and others. 



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