Inkpen Was Furious And Swore That It Would Not Be Saddled With The Cost Of A Great Public Double Execution.

The line dividing the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its own miscreants!

As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet being erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric earthworks - a spot commanding one of the finest and most extensive views in Southern England. The day appointed for the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other that it reminded them of old times. All classes were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon was the talk of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.

Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many, many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her!

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