Category Archives: Crime

1900: Joseph Holden, killer of his own grandson

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This morning in 1900, Bury ironturner Joseph Holden was executed at Manchester’s Strangeways Prison for the murder of his grandson.

“The convict’s sanity had been in some doubt,” in the bloodless words of the next day’s London Times. To read it a century later is to see a man deeply in need of help.

It was his married daughter Mary Dawes who tried to give it to him by taking him in under her own roof after Holden was reduced to living in a workhouse.

In August of 1900 he took another of his grandchildren — not by Mary Dawes — to a quarry to cut tobacco, then hurled a stone that hit the child in the head. George Eldred was badly injured, but survived.

The mental deterioration betokened by such behavior must have put Mary Dawes or any other kin with an interest in the patriarch’s well-being into a terrible bind. What resources of state or charity could they have called upon, short of consigning him to the miasma of some gaol? At 57 years of age, Holden was already 10 years past the male life expectancy for the time and looked still older thanks to the ravages of alcoholism. Maybe Mary thought that having him at her hearth would stabilize him well enough to dignify whatever little measure of life remained to her father.

That is nothing but a speculative assessment of these bare and tragic facts: Mary Dawes took her father in; days later, on September 5, Mary’s father took Mary’s son John to a quarry and drowned him.


Hampshire Advertiser, September 12, 1900.

Holden’s only defense — practically the only one really available to him — was insanity. But Holden wasn’t starkers; his mind perambulated that foggy wilderness between lucidity and dementia and this was simply insufficient disturbance for the then-prevailing legal standard of madness, the M’Naghten Test. Basically, if he could understand what he’d done, he was sane enough to hang. Still to this day the basis of competency assessments in much of the English-speaking world, M’Naghten offers only a narrow ground for avoiding the full measure of criminal responsibility. And Holden was clearly competent enough by that test; indeed, he had complained of his treatment in Mary’s house, hinting at a real motive.

Although Holden’s death sentence was automatic upon the unhelpful sanity assessment of the doctors,* he was thought a prime candidate for a reprieve from the Home Secretary. This too did not materialize; Holden’s own contrition and resignation to his fate in the days leading up to the execution might have contributed to the judgment that he was in fact sane enough to die. That’s some catch: the best there is.

A murderer named Oscar Mattson — a Russian sailor who had slain a young English prostitute named Mary Ann Macguire in a rage over stolen money and rebuffed advances — did win a Home Secretary reprieve on the same day that Holden hanged.

* It was only necessary for doctors to find him competent enough to make his own plea. When they did so, he simply pleaded guilty.

Part of the Themed Set: Filicide.

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1556: Beatrice, a servant

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An everyday execution in 16th century Montpellier, from the diary of Swiss medical student Felix Platter — whom we have already had cause to notice in these pages:

Beatrice, Catalan’s former servant girl, who had drawn off my boots when I had first arrived in Montpellier, was executed on the 3rd of December. She was hanged in the square, on a little gibbet that had only one arm. She had left us a year before to go into service in the house of a priest. She became pregnant, and when her child was born, she threw it into the latrine, where it was found dead. Beatrice’s body was taken to the anatomy theatre, and it remained several days in the College. The womb was still swollen, for the birth of the child had occurred no more than eight days before. Afterwards the hangman came to collect the pieces, wrapped them in a sheet, and hung them on a gibbet outside the town.

Part of the Themed Set: Filicide.

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1917: Lation Scott lynched

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this date in 1917, 24-year-old black farmhand Lation (or Ligon) Scott died a horrible death in Dyersburg, Tennessee.

For the two years prior to his extrajudicial “execution” by a lynch mob, Scott had worked as a farmhand for a white family, doing the farm chores while the husband worked at his job in Dyersburg.

He got on well with the family and was fond of the two children. He seemed like an ordinary enough man and a good worker, according to the NAACP journal The Crisis:

Accounts as to his intelligence vary widely. One report asserts that he was almost half-witted. Others attribute to him the intelligence of the average country Negro… He had the reputation of being a splendid hand at doing general housework, or “spring-cleaning,” and…had done this sort of work for a prominent woman of Dyersburg. She states that she was alone in the house with him for two days.

No trouble resulted.

In addition to farming and the doing of odd jobs, he was a preacher. On November 22, 1917, however, he allegedly raped the farmer’s wife while her husband was at work. He threatened to kill her if she reported what he had done. He then fled, leaving his victim bound and gagged inside the farmhouse.

The woman was able to free herself and identify her attacker, and the community took swift action, searching extensively for Scott and offering a $200 reward for his apprehension. Scott was able to elude capture for ten days, though, making his way fifty miles to Madison County. There, a railroad worker recognized him and he was arrested.

The sheriff’s deputy for Dyer County, along with some other men (including, presciently, an undertaker), picked up the accused man and started off back to Dyersburg by car in the wee hours of the morning. They didn’t bother taking an indirect route for the purpose of their journey.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people gathered along the road and waited for their quarry.

And when he appeared, they forced the car off the road and made the officers turn over their prisoner.

These people were not typical of the average lynch mob: rather than stringing him up on the spot, they drew up a list of twelve “jurors” and, at noon, after church let out, drove Scott to the county courthouse for a “trial.”

Scott was ordered to stand up and asked, “Are you guilty or not guilty?”

Scott admitted he was guilty, and the “jury” voted for conviction.

Although one “prominent citizen” asked the people not to be barbaric, because it was Sunday and because “the reputation of the county was at stake,” both the rape victim and her husband wanted Scott to be burned alive rather than merely hanged.

The Crisis‘s description of what happened is not for the faint-hearted.

The Negro was seated on the ground and a buggy-axle driven into the ground between his legs. His feet were chained together, with logging chains, and he was tied with wire. A fire was built. Pokers and flat-irons were procured and heated in the fire… Reports of the torturing, which have been generally accepted and have not been contradicted, are that the Negro’s clothes and skin were ripped from his body simultaneously with a knife. His self-appointed executioners burned his eye-balls with red-hot irons. When he opened his mouth to cry for mercy a red-hot poker was rammed down his gullet. In the same subtle way he was robbed of his sexual organs. Red-hot irons were placed on his feet, back and body, until a hideous stench of burning flesh filled the Sabbath air of Dyersburg, Tenn.

Thousands of people witnessed this scene. They had to be pushed back from the stake to which the Negro was chained. Roof-tops, second-story windows, and porch-tops were filled with spectators. Children were lifted to shoulders, that they might behold the agony of the victim.

It took three and a half hours for the man to die.

Margaret Vandiver wrote in Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South, “The lynching of Lation Scott was the most ghastly of all those I researched.”

This spectacle of horror took place in broad daylight, and no one in the mob wore masks.

Nevertheless, no one was ever prosecuted.

According to The Crisis,

Public opinion in Dyersburg and Dyer County seems to be divided into two groups. One group considers that the Negro got what he deserved. The other group feels that he should have had a “decent lynching.”

A “decent lynching” was defined as “a quick, quiet hanging, with no display or torturing.”

One local citizen remarked that he thought the people who tortured and killed Lation Scott were no better than the rapist himself. Another simply commented, “It was the biggest thing since the Ringling Brothers’ Circus came to town.”

Lation Scott’s was the last lynching in Dyer County history.


Wire report in the Salt Lake Telegram, Dec. 3, 1917.

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2006: Sanjaya Rowan Kumara, with “signs of life”

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Sri Lankan national Sanjaya Rowan Kumara was hanged on this date in 2006 at Kuwait’s Central Prison for murdering a woman while robbing her house.

He was pronounced dead and cut down within eight minutes. But …

medics who transported his body to a morgue said they noticed he was still moving, Al-Qabas daily reported.

Forensic experts were immediately called to examine the body and they confirmed that “there was some weak pulse in his heart,” the daily said.

The examination was repeated several times and each time “the dead body showed some signs of life,” Al-Qabas quoted unnamed medical sources as saying.

“They eventually pronounced him completely dead at 1400 hours local time,” five hours after his hanging, the sources said.

The justice ministry refused to comment on the report but head of the criminal execution department, Najeeb al-Mulla, who supervised the hanging, told Al-Watan newspaper the report was “baseless.”

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1802: Captain William Codlin, maritime insurance scammer

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From A Peep Into the Past: Brighton in the Olden Time, with Glances at the Present, by John George Bishop:

In 1802 an event, at which “all the world wondered,” took place off Hove. This was the supposed foundering of the good ship Adventure, Captain William Codlin, commander.

The morning of Sunday, August 8th, 1802, was bright and beautiful; towards noon, however, there was a dense fog, which lasted the whole afternoon. There was little or no wind; the sea was calm; and in the evening, as the fog cleared, a brig, evidently abandoned by her crew, was seen coming heavily, as if water-laden, westward.

Just as she reached opposite the bottom of Hove-street, the water was up to her bulwarks, when down she sank, and was wholly lost to view.

Strong suspicion of foul play was excited, as there appeared to be nothing to account for such a disaster. This suspicion proved to be true — the object of the Captain evidently being to obtain the insurance money. All was apparently well-planned; but

The best laid schemes o’ mice and men,
Gang aft a gley.

As the tide receded, the top of one of the brig’s masts appeared above water, indicating her whereabouts; and Mr. S. Stepney, of Brighton, was employed to raise her.

A day or two after the occurrence Dr. Hargraves was on “the Bank,” at the bottom of West-street, Brighton, and Captain Codlin happened to be standing near him. The Doctor said, “Don’t you think, Captain, they’ll get her up?”

“I’ll swallow hell fire, if they do,” replied Codlin.

The four fishing-boats engaged by Mr. Stepney, however, did their work successfully; and when the Adventure was towed ashore, a hole was discovered in the ship’s bottom; and the auger with which it was bored was lying near it!

Codlin, anticipating this discovery, had previously taken the coach to London, going thence to Dover, where he got on board a vessel, with the vie of getting across the Channel.

But justice was on his track. Another vessel was dispatched, which overtook the former, and he was brought back to London — a prisoner.

Codlin was subsequently tried for the offence, found guilty, and, as was then the custom, hung for his crime at Execution Dock, Woolwich. The raising of the Adventure cost Mr. Stepney £30, for which he was never reimbursed one farthing! His sole memento of the transaction was a dirk, found on board the ship; and this is still in the possession of a member of his family.

From the Morning Post and Gazetteer (London, England), November 29, 1802.

As early as six o’clock on Saturday morning [Saturday, November 27, 1802], a croud began to assemble opposite Newgate, to see Codlin go into the cart, and proceed to the place of execution, pursuant to his sentence for sinking the brig Adventure.

About eight, the spectators had increased prodigiously, so much so, that the multitude extended from Ludgate hill to Newgate-street. All the windows were crouded, and the tops of the houses were covered with people.

At ten minutes before nine, the unhappy man was brought out at the felons’ door. When he appeared, he was perfectly composed, and indeed cheerful.

He was a very personable man, as it is called, of the age of 36, and a ruddy complexion; and was well dressed in a blue coat, white waistcoat, mixture small clothes, and white stocking.

He ascended into the cart, which was covered with black, with a firm step and steady countenance, attended by the two executioners, Jack Ketch and his deputy, and another person appointed to read prayers to him on the road.

His arms were tied back with ropes, and the rope was round his neck. The cart went towards Newgate-street, preceded by the City Marshal on horseback, and the whole phalanx of peace officers, mustering nearly 100.

The Under Sheriffs, as usual, attended in their carriages, in one of which went the Chaplain.

In this order the procession proceeded slowly through Newgate-street, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall street, to Whitechapel.

During the journey, the prisoner looked up only once, and that was when the cavalcade got to the Royal Exchange. At Whitechapel they turned down the New Road, and arrived at Execution Dock soon after ten o’clock; the procession, preceded by the Deputy Marshal of the Admiralty on horseback, with his silver car.

At the sight of the gibbet (which had been previously erected at low water mark), the unhappy man started back with an apparent horror in his countenance at the vie of his approaching fate; that was the only symptom of fear which he betrayed on the occasion.

The obstructions by the different turnings in the way, and by the concourse of people filling every passage, did not seem to disturb the settled firmness of his mind.

As the procession drew near to the scene of execution, the difficulties of the passage became continually greater, so that it was hardly possible for the peace officers to clear the way.

At the entrance towards the dock, it became necessary that the criminal should be removed out of the cart, to walk to the scaffold, which was yet at some distance. He descended from the cart with the assistance of those who were beside him. After coming down, he stood as erect as the confinement of his shoulders and arms would allow. His looks wore still an air of unchanged firmness. He walked on with a steady step, and was even observed, by some gentlemen, to chuse the least dirty paths, so as to avoid bemiring his legs, while he went on.

He ascended the ladder to the scaffold, without betraying any new emotions of terror.

On the scaffold he joined in prayers with the clergyman, who was there in attendance, for two or three minutes. He shook the clergyman’s hand in taking farewell, with somewhat of a convulsive grasp.

He turned up his eyes and looked for a moment earnestly at the shipping opposite. A cap was put on his head; he drew it with his own hand, over his eyes. The board, upon a signal from the Sheriff, who sat in an opposite window, was soon after dropped from under his feet. In to or three minutes he appeared to expire without a struggle.

After hanging the usual time, the body was cut down and put into a coffin, covered with a cloth, then into a boat, and attended by the executioners, Mr. Gale, the undertaker, and two peace officers, the boat, a four-oared one, proceeded up the river, nearly to Blackfriars-bridge, where the coffin was landed. The body was conveyed to the house of Mr. Gale, in the Old bailey, here it remained yesterday for interment.

The concourse of people was as great as ever remembered. Many seafaring men were of course present. An immense concourse of people attended his progress from the gaol to the place of execution; it continually augmented while he proceeded.

When he reached the scaffold, the whole neighbourhood, to a considerable distance, was filled with one throng; all the decks of the ships round the dock, and a multitude of boats on the river, were equally crowded with spectators. The solemnity of the occasion seemed to make a due impression on the mob.

It was not until the night of Thursday that the unhappy man ceased to entertain hopes of a reprieve; he was very cheerful until his brother visited him on that evening, and bade him prepare for death, for that every hope was lost.

The prisoner as then much affected; but his brother, by his repeated assurances that he would be a friend to his wife, and a father to his child, made him more easy and collected. His wife was with him until twelve o’clock on the night preceding his execution.

Codlin was a native of Scarborough. We are assured by those who knew him, that a better seaman was not in the North coast trade, in which he had long sailed between Sunderland and London.

He had two or three years since begun to drink occasionally too much. He was not in employment, and his wife and children were in distress, at the time he entered into the fatal engagement.

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1964: Glen Sabre Valance, the last hanged in South Australia

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On this date in 1964, Glen Sabre Valance became the last person hanged in South Australia.

Born Paul Fraser, he jazzed up the handle by cribbing the surname of the title outlaw from the 1962 John Ford Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Like that Lee Marvin cutthroat, “Glen Valance” was destined to live a brutal life with a violent end.

In the early morning of 16 June 1964, the 21-year-old Valance broke into the home of his former employer, Richard Strang. He had a standing dispute with the Bordertown farmer over wages but his real grudge ran deeper than that. Strang had bemusedly read the sensitive youth’s diary to other farmhands weeks before, resulting in an altercation — and, after Valance drove off with some of his effects, a police report and an arrest.

Valance nursed “bad thoughts” against his tormenter, he muttered to his family. They turned out worse than anyone could have expected: bad enough to justify his adopted alias.

As Strang and his wife dozed in bed, Valance leveled his rifle at the hated ex-boss, and leveled the score. Then he seized the waking Suzanne Strang and raped her there in the bed sodden with the gore of her husband’s warm corpse.

As Valance hightailed it out of Kooroon Station, Suzanne Strang phoned police — and the resulting roadblocks snared the murderer that very day, with the murder weapon right there in the passenger seat … actually riding shotgun. Valance mounted an unsuccessful insanity defense.

In 2011, Lillian Clavell — ten years old at the time of her half-brother’s execution — published a book, A Tormented Soul: The Tragic Life of Glen Sabre Valance, the Last Man to be Hanged in South Australia.

In it, a Clavell still affectionate for her big brother points to their savagely abusive mother as the root cause of the adult Paul/Glen’s horrific crime. (Lillian says that her father shielded her from the worst of any domestic violence, but Paul had no father in his life and no such protection.)

I know she burnt his hands on the stove. I know she put his face through a window. Once she held a knife to his throat and said she’d kill him if he ever stole anything from the cupboard again. I believe that (abuse) led very much to his crime.

Valance was hanged in an unused guard tower (the “Hanging Tower”) of Adelaide Gaol. The facility is unused today, but the date November 24, 1964 and the letters GSV still remain printed on the brick wall.

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2011: Chen Weijun, rapist karaoke man

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On this date in 2011, China executed a karaoke bar proprietor in Zhejiang province for a rape spree.

Not to be confused with his documentary filmmaker countryman, Chen Weijun “targeted young innocent middle-school girls after seducing them with money and violently threatening them,” said the official report. “He raped 14 Lishui middle-school girls, including nine children, in cars, karaoke bars, hotels and underground parking lots.” (The legal definition of a “child” here is 14 years old, which is why some students were and some were not.)

The crimes occurred from 2007 to 2009, but the context of the execution itself was a whole spate of recent unsettling special-victims-unit stories … like the peasant who raped over 100 women, and the firefighter who kept six sex slaves in his basement dungeon.

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1721: Christiana Bell

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

The story of Christiana Bell’s execution in Gloucester County in modern-day New Jersey on or shortly before November 21, 1721, begins in 1703. That was the first time she was accused of infanticide: they had found a dead baby and Christiana, a domestic servant who was probably only in her teens at the time, came under suspicion because she had been pregnant out of wedlock and was suddenly not pregnant but with no infant to show for it.

Her trial in 1703 was presided over by Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, governor of the New York and New Jersey colonies. She was convicted and sentenced to death. However, Lord Cornbury took pity on her — perhaps because of her youth, or maybe there were doubts about her guilt — and first commuted the death sentence, then issued a full pardon. Christiana returned home, having spent fourteen months behind bars but not stretched her neck.

She didn’t learn the lesson Lord Cornbury might have wanted her to learn from her fortuitous escape.

In 1720, she was rearrested for the exact same crime: she’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock again, delivered a live baby and did away with it.

Christiana very nearly got lucky again: her death sentence was suspended and she got a chance to plead her case before New Jersey Supreme Court on May 2, 1721. Today, appeals in capital cases are automatic; in Christiana’s time, this was an unusual and perhaps unprecedented legal maneuver.

Unfortunately, it backfired on her: the prosecution was ready with witnesses who testified about Christiana Bell’s notorious past and her prior conviction and death sentence. This time there would be no reprieve.

The exact date of her execution is not known for certain, but on November 21, 1721, the Gloucester County Board of Freeholders approved funds to reimburse the sheriff for expenses he’d incurred in hanging her.

See Legal Executions in New Jersey: A Comprehensive Registry, 1691-1963.

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1895: Jesus Vialpando and Feliciano Chavez, desperados

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On this date in 1895, two outlaws hanged publicly at Las Vegas, New Mexico, for killing a rancher during a raid on his cattle earlier that year.

We will come soon enough to Jesus Vialpando and Feliciano Chavez, but their story and ours properly begins a bit earlier … with a gentleman named Vicente Silva.

From the San Francisco Call, July 3, 1898 (via)

Silva had struck silver and cashed his claim in for the proprietorship of a saloon in Las Vegas, NM where he tolled the vices of later prospectors and of the ranchers and herders who peopled the area.

In the 1880s the deposits were drying up and with them the tumblers at Silva’s well. Ever the enterprising businessman, he procured a remote ranch to use as the base for a fresh initiative: running by night a secretive gang that terrorized San Miguel county and neighboring Guadlupe, Mora, and Santa Fe counties, too. For a couple of years these villains had the run of unsettled territory’s rural places, and waylaid travelers or rustled livestock with near impunity — murdering when necessary and even brazenly “disappearing” some ranchers known to be too vigorous about defending themselves.

The Silva gang came unglued in the winter of 1892-93. Suspecting one of its number of preparing to expose him, Silva ordered the man done to death — and Pat Maes was efficiently lynched to a bridge in a driving snowstorm. Silva himself fled his legitimate persona in Las Vegas and embraced outlawry as a fugitive in the bush.

Having already proven his willingness to slay his own followers, Silva soon had to go even farther than that: in February 1893 he demanded that his cronies murder his (Silva’s) wife, and the wife’s brother — again for fear of betrayal. The men so tasked did carry out their orders, but, wary of the Robespierrian trend betokened by these purges, they also took the opportunity to murder Silva himself.

That scattered his associated desperadoes to the desert winds. Pursued by rewards on their heads — and no longer in mortal terror of the chief’s vengeance should they turn stool pigeon on their former mates to collect — many of the gangsters were rounded up in the years to come.

Our two characters, Vialpando and Chavez, numbered among Silva’s dispersed marauders and had managed to escape the most recent instance of a tattling comrade. Come the winter of 1894-95, two years on from Silva’s exit stage 6 feet under, these ex-henchmen still had their former liberty … and none of their former ease.

Staggering through another blizzard like the one that had fallen on poor Pat Maes so many moons before, they* came upon Lorenzo Martinez’s land and trespassed with famished gusto. They had soon made of one of Martinez’s cows a much-needed repast, but as they huddled around a fire to devour it in warmth, the rancher’s son Tomas arrived on the scene. Who knows but with what suspicion these parties eyed one another, and what guarded words they exchanged. Later Vialpando would explain through an interpreter that, catching glimpse of the man’s cartridge belt “I became afraid of him that he might be the owner of that animal that we had killed there,” and with familiar glances to Feliciano made a silent impromptu pact to kill Martinez before the rancher got a drop on them.

Four days later, Martinez’s faithful dog Gallardo — whom the raiders had also shot, but not managed to kill — turned up back at the family homestead half-frozen and matted in its own blood and all but dragged Martinez’s brother to the spot where Tomas’s cremated remains mingled with the carcass of the dead cow. The discovery was quick enough to put authorities on the right track, and they had Vialpando and Chavez in custody within a fortnight.

They offered only a feeble attempt at spinning the admitted homicide as “self-defense”. At the prisoners’ request, Governor William Thornton met personally with them in jail a few days before their hanging, where the doomed men begged for mercy “without pretending to give any reason why he should” grant it. (New Mexican, Nov. 14, 1895)

Around 6 o’clock on the morning of November 19, Vialpando was escorted alone to a one-man public gallows at an arroyo north of town. Wan and terrified, Vialpando had all he could do to keep his composure and made no statement before he was efficiently executed.

By 7 o’clock the sheriff’s party had returned to the jail for Chavez. Less unmanned by the occasion, Chavez had a rambling 18-minute address to the crowd from the gallows, translated on the fly from his Spanish by a handy interpreter, the substance of which was to vaguely distribute among the rest of his party enough responsibility for Martinez’s murder that he could complain about taking the punishment for it. At last, with the parting cry of “Adios, todos!”, Chavez too was hanged at 8 o’clock.

The men’s bodies were shipped a few miles down the way to their families in Romeroville, along with a few dollars in nickels they had accumulated from well-wishers while awaiting execution. A public subscription covered the cost of their burial.

* The party was four in all. Zenobia Trujillo and Emilio Encinias were present when Martinez found their party but were sent away before he was murdered; they were charged as accessories after the fact.

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1700: Jamie Macpherson, Highlander

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The legendary Highlands freebooter Jamie Macpherson was hanged on this date in 1700 in Banff.

Macpherson is said to be an illegitimate half-Gypsy child with every talent necessary to live larger than life — and if gigantism can be inferred from the size of his enormous alleged sword, that would be extremely large indeed.

Besides his elite SPARQ score, Macpherson was blessed with complementary gifts for making music and sweet sweet love, and plundered livestock and merchandise and maidenheads as he sprang through the vicinities of Banff and Aberdeen. Despite living by his prowess with the sword every source concurs that he never used it to harm anyone that the audience would sympathize with.

But he outraged the local grandees, and at length he was apprehended (as befits his outsized tale) by a fellow with the improbable name “Duff of Braco” — then was duly condemned to hang on market-day (“Forasmeikle as you James McPherson, pannal are found guilty by ane verdict of ane assyse, to be knoun, holden, and repute to be Egiptian and a wagabond” etc.).

In the week before his hanging, Macpherson reportedly composed an air variously described as “Macpherson’s Lament” or “Rant” or “Farewell” which he then performed on the gallows.

In the most picturuesque version, he played his own fiddle in this exit performance, then dramatically smashed the instrument. As Chambers’s Journal observes, it seems hard to accept that the sheriff would have given this veritable Goliath the free use of his hands at such a desperate moment. Indeed, local legend has it that the authorities were so afraid that a reprieve might arrive that upon catching sight of an approaching rider on the horizon, they put the town’s clocks 15 minutes forward.

At any rate, several versions of the Lament/Rant/Farewell survive and one can follow its evolution in this open-source Annals of Banff. Robert Burns’s eventually immortalized the verse with this gloss on it from the late 18th century:

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