344 Notes on the Border of Wilts and Hants. 



found his horse with one of his hinder legs in his mouth, so fast, 

 that it was difficult for men with a lever to get it out. 



All these circumstances were related by Mr. Mompesson. The 

 drummer, whose drum had been taken from him, was suspected to 

 be at the bottom of it all. He was tried at Salisbury assizes, and 

 condemned to be transported. He went, but somehow or other 

 contrived to get back again. Mr. Mompesson then prosecuted him 

 at Gloucester, as a felon, for supposed witchcraft, but he was acquitted. 



The second Earl of Chesterfield, in one of his letters, says that 

 the whole country was ringing with this story of the drum which 

 Mr. Mompesson declared to be true. At last, in 1664.. King 

 Charles II. sent down Lord Falmouth, and the Queen sent Lord 

 Chesterfield to the house to examine the truth of it. They could 

 neither hear nor see anything extraordinary. The next year the 

 King told Lord Chesterfield that he had discovered the cheat, for 

 that Mr. Mompesson had confessed it all to him. Mr. Mompesson, 

 however, in a printed letter, declared that he had never made any 

 such confession. There is a curious examination in a journal called 

 the " Mercurius Rusticus," of the 16th April, 1663, by which it 

 appears that one William Drury, of Ufcot, near Broad Hinton, in 

 Wilts, was the Invisible Drummer. Samuel Pepys, the author of 

 the famous journal, read Mr. Glanville's narrative of the mysterious 

 disturbances; and says of it: " The discourse well writ, in good 

 style, but, methinks, not very convincing." 



Mr. James Waylen, formerly of Devizes, the historian of that 

 town and of Marlborough, writing in 1854, mentioned that he was 

 possessed of some private original letters elucidating the history. I 

 have not seen anything more from his pen upon the subject, except 

 what he says in the Appendix to his History of Marlborough 

 (p. 553) : — -"Every place has its ghost story. Hardly any of such 

 legends are worth recording, except as illustrations of the remarkable 

 hold which they appear to take on the fancy of both the learned 

 and the rude, at certain epochs in the religious life of nations. Few 

 persons are aware to what an extent the public mind was engaged 

 at that time in questions of this sort/' [The very judges on the 

 bench, the great Sir Matthew Hale himself, you will remember, were 



