The Bayeux Tapestry

So, the Bayeux Tapestry is to be displayed in this country for the first time? Well I for one am delighted to hear this. There’s a personal reason, for it’s the Bayeux Tapestry that first got me interested in history when I went on a family holiday in Normandy in 1987 (we visited Bayeux, among other places, and a few months later there was a school trip down to Kent and Sussex which included a visit to Battle Abbey – and that, as they say, was that).

The most famous depiction of the events of 1066 – the most famous date in English history, for that was a year of three Kings and two invasions – the Bayeux Tapestry was probably made in the 1070s under the orders of Bishop Odo, the half-brother of William the Conqueror. It is actually an embroidered cloth rather than a tapestry (although ‘Bayeux Embroidered Cloth’ just sounds wrong) and measures 230 feet by 20 inches. An alternative theory is that it was made at the orders of (or even by) William’s wife, Queen Matilda, which is why it’s sometimes known in French as La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde. The Odo theory is more likely, though, and not just because the man himself makes an appearance. He is seen fighting at the battle of Hastings, albeit armed with a club rather than a sword (perhaps symbolic of his clerical status, although it’s worth noting that William himself is shown carrying a club into battle too, so maybe it was a sign of seniority). 

Odo was the Bishop of Bayeux, and after the Conquest he also became the Earl of Kent which supports the theory that the Tapestry was actually made in England. The earliest known reference to the Tapestry dates back to 1476, when it was mentioned in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral which it had probably been made to adorn. Bayeux was where William made Harold promise that he would support his (William’s) claim to the English throne, although the cathedral itself wasn’t consecrated until 1077.

Although obviously intended to tell the story of the Norman Conquest from the Normans’ perspective – to the extend that King Harold’s victory over the King of Norway at Stamford Bridge and subsequent twelve-day march from York to Sussex in order to fight William doesn’t get a look-in – it’s not all one-sided propaganda. William did not recognise Harold as the rightful King of England after Edward the Confessor’s death in early 1066 (indeed, as far as he was concerned Harold had promised to support him), but Harold is nevertheless shown on the Tapestry with the regalia of kingship and explicitly named as England’s King (the text reads Harold Rex Anglorum – Harold, King of the English – the first King of England to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, in fact). It’s a funny way of depicting someone who, according to the brother of the man who had the Tapestry made, had no right to be King. Maybe the English seamstresses who stitched the Tapestry were being a bit subversive.

In Harold’s death scene, the famous arrow-in-the-eye could well be more propaganda than fact, because perjurers were commonly punished in Medieval times by way of having weapons poked through their eyes. William’s claim to the throne would be upheld by depicting Harold as an oath-breaker, which this is evidently an attempt at doing (whether Harold was coerced into promising support for William is, of course, another matter although it does seem likely). Other historical sources state that the King was hacked to death by some Norman knights, and indeed the very next scene shows a man, who may well also be Harold, being slain by way of a sword.

There is also a depiction of some Norman brutality towards the English – they’re shown as burning down someone’s house, although given the brutal and ruthless way in which William would later deal with any English resistance to his rule, perhaps that is to be expected.

The Tapestry is also unfinished, or rather incomplete – for the end is missing. When it was first made, it would doubtless have brought the story of the Norman Conquest to a conclusion by showing the (remaining) English nobles surrendering to William at Berkhamstead, and William’s subsequent coronation on Christmas Day, 1066, although for as long as people have been studying the Tapestry that part has not been there. There have been attempts in modern times to make the final part, though, as witness the 2013 effort by over 400 people on Alderney. As it is, the last (remaining) scene on the Tapestry shows the English fleeing from the battlefield.

The Tapestry did not become widely known until the eighteenth century. After the 1476 inventory, the next reference we have to the Tapestry is in 1724. The first detailed account of it in English was written in the 1730s but not published until the 1760s, although William Stukeley, the antiquarian who has cropped up on this blog before in relation to Avebury, mentioned it in a 1743 book of his. During the French Revolution it narrowly avoided being used as covering for wagons, and after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power it was displayed in Paris for the purposes of propaganda – this was, after all, a depiction of a successful invasion of England. It remained in Paris, and by the Second World War it was on display in the Louvre – the SS tried to have it shipped to Berlin when the liberation was imminent, but fortunately they were not successful. After the war, it was moved back to Bayeux. It’s been there, in its own museum near the cathedral, ever since. Previous attempts to have the Tapestry moved to England on a temporary basis – for the Coronation in 1953, and later for the 900^th anniversary of the battle of Hastings in 1966 – have not been unsuccessful, and tests will need to be done on it to make sure that it can be safely moved. The question of where it will be displayed is also one that will need to be addressed.

Getting back to the tapestry itself, some of the detail is fascinating – we see people hunting and ploughing the fields while the political/military stuff is going on above them, and Westminster Abbey makes an appearance, as God blesses it (yes, He’s there too) in time for the funeral of Edward the Confessor, the man who built it. This, weirdly, is shown before Edward’s death scene. 

Halley’s Comet appears in the sky. 

Then there are the oddities which are part of what makes the Bayeux Tapestry such a fascinating piece or artwork. Why, for example, is Edward the Confessor shown dying after his funeral? And, on a more trivial matter, are the invading Normans really eating kebabs? It looks like they are.

And, of course, what’s with the naked people in the, ahem, bottom section? There’s a man doing what appears to be a carpentry job in the buff, while his friend looks like he’s doing some exercises!

When a full-size replica was made in the 1880s, the naked people were given underpants; that version is on display in Reading, while there are other replicas of the Tapestry in North America and Denmark.

Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 2)

The smuggling of wool out of England declined in the early eighteenth century, as European weavers found cheaper sources of wool elsewhere and other clothing materials, such as cotton, started to appear in Europe. That did not mean that smuggling was at an end, though – in fact, smuggling as it is popularly perceived today was just getting started, for by that time there was more money to be made smuggling goods into Britain (and it was indeed Britain by this point, the UK having been created as a result of the Act of Union in 1707). Products like alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea all had high import duties imposed on them, which led to much smuggling of such goods. Tea in particular was an expensive drink, yet in the early eighteenth century the English were well on their way to becoming a nation of tea-drinkers.

The smuggler, therefore, came to be seen as a public benefactor who could supply tea – or brandy, or tobacco – at a reasonable price. Not everyone thought well of smuggling, though. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, often preached against it, although for the most part his words fell on deaf ears; more than a generation after him, attitudes towards smugglers were better summed up by the essayist Charles Lamb, who described the smuggler as an “honest thief” who robbed “nothing but the revenue – an abstraction I never greatly cared about”. Smugglers could also pay quite well, and many a farm labourer supplemented his meagre income by way of some nocturnal fetching and carrying (quite literally ‘moonlighting’).

Being located on the edge of Romney Marsh, the Sussex port of Rye was very much a smugglers’ town where the magistrates and the riding officers struggled and often failed to keep things under control. Two such magistrates were James Lamb and Allen Grebell, who we have previously encountered as (respectively) the intended victim and the actual victim in the ‘murder by mistake’ case. These gentlemen, who both served as Mayor of Rye in the early-to-mid eighteenth century, are on record as having acquitted those accused of smuggling due to insufficient evidence on more than one occasion, such decisions perhaps being taken more out of fear for their personal safety than any other consideration. Both knew what happened to Gabriel Tomkins, a bailiff who’d arrested one Thomas Moore for a smuggling-related offence at Rye in 1735. After being bailed, Moore went to the Mermaid Inn, nowadays a famous old pub-cum-hotel but then a notorious smuggler hang-out, where he met with several others. Unfortunately for Tomkins, he happened to be staying at the Mermaid Inn. Moore and his friends forced the bailiff out of his room, dragged him out into the street, relieved him of the bail-bonds and arrest warrants that he had on him, took him down to the harbour and put him on a ship to be taken overseas. He was only rescued from that last bit because the captain of the local revenue ship heard what had happened and ordered all of the ships in the harbour to be searched.

The smugglers were violent men, notorious for killing riding officers and anyone else who took too close an interest in their affairs – so much so that many ordinary people were only too happy to turn a blind eye to their activities, such was their fear of incurring the wrath of the smugglers. Lamb and Grebell, and others like them, would have found themselves and their families in danger had they taken a firmer approach to smuggling (Tomkins was lucky he wasn’t killed). At the time, the most notorious group of smugglers operating in the Romney Marsh area were the Hawkhurst Gang, named after the Kentish village of the same name, who during the 1730s and 1740s terrorised Kent and Sussex. They were regular customers at the Mermaid Inn – and when they drank there, they’d sit with their weapons on the tables, clearly with no fear of the authorities.

The seeds of their downfall were sown in October 1747 when they were expecting a large consignment of tea which was due to be landed in Sussex but which in the event was seized when the ship that was carrying it was intercepted at sea and taken to Poole in Dorset. The tea was taken to the custom house at Poole, and it says something for the audacity of the Hawkhurst Gang that they decided to go to Dorset, attack the customs house and steal ‘their’ tea. They duly managed to pull off this heist, but several months later one of their number was arrested in connection with the raid and imprisoned at Chichester. The rest of the gang decided that in order to protect themselves, anyone stepping forward with evidence against their incarcerated comrade should be killed.

Two men – the custom house keeper and a shoemaker – came forward as witnesses to the raid. They were on their way to have their evidence taken by a magistrate when they stopped at a pub called the White Hart in a village called Rowlands Castle (then in Sussex, now in Hampshire). Unfortunately for them, the pub landlady was an ally of the smugglers and she quickly sent a message to the Hawkhurst Gang. It wasn’t long before seven of them turned up; posing as locals, they plied the witnesses with booze until they passed out. When they came to, they found that they’d both been tied astride a horse. The smugglers whipped them and took them to a well where they threatened to throw them in. They then whipped one of them to death and attempted to hang the other; they botched that, so they threw him down the well, and then threw some big stones in after him to finish him off.

When the bodies were found, the sheer brutality of what the smugglers had done turned many against them, and one by one they were rounded up. All seven went on trial for murder at the Chichester Assizes; they were all found guilty and six of them were hanged (the seventh died in prison before he could be taken to the gallows). Of the remaining members of the Hawkhurst Gang still at large, one of them accused another of stealing some of the tea that had been taken in the raid; he beat him to death and hid his body in a pond. He was later arrested for that murder, and he too ended his life on the gallows almost two years after that fateful consignment of tea had been seized. That, more or less, was the end of the Hawkhurst Gang.

But their downfall did not deter others – indeed, it left a vacuum that other smuggling gangs were quick to fill. The situation on land was bad, for even if a smuggler was arrested it was notoriously difficult to secure a conviction, such was the intimidatory nature of the smuggling gangs. At sea, meanwhile, the revenue men were invariably outnumbered – in 1720, for example, the captain of the Rye revenue ship reported: “3 large Calais sloops loaded with brandy &c lye now off this Harbour, about 30 men in each sloop watching for my comeing out. If I have not more men or a Man of Warr ordered to cruise with me I am useless, & the rideing officers dare not appear on ye coast.” Throughout the eighteenth century, there were never enough revenue ships to deal with smugglers, with the various overseas wars in which Britain was involved meaning that for long periods of time the Royal Navy wasn’t able to help out in any great numbers.

As far as the government was concerned, smuggling was a clear public order problem, especially in Kent and Sussex where smuggling gangs were to all intents and purposes private armies; troops were posted to coastal towns but they could be withdrawn at times of war. On Romney Marsh, it was said, “the smugglers go around in such large gangs and are so daring that it is absolutely necessary to have military force”. There was an obvious solution, and that was to cut the import taxes so as to make smuggling economically unviable. Pitt the Younger understood this, and in the 1780s he cut the duty on tea and reduced the duty on French wine, but any hopes of putting a stop to smuggling by lowering import duties were dashed when Britain found herself at war with Revolutionary France in 1792 (a situation that would last, on and off, until 1815); in times of war, taxes had to go up.

Smuggling as a large-scale criminal activity therefore continued into the early nineteenth century, a time when the threat of a French invasion led to new coastal defences on and around Romney Marsh. A defensive ditch called the Royal Military Canal was dug, and a series of fortifications called Martello Towers were built (some of these can still be seen at various points along the Kent and Sussex coasts). The invasion never came, but after 1815 these defences were combined with an increased military presence in the area and the enforcement of a naval blockade at sea to serve as a significant deterrent to smuggling.

But smuggling persisted – many ex-servicemen who now found themselves unemployed took to smuggling, and bloody encounters between smugglers and government forces were now the order of the day. By this time, the biggest smuggling gang on Romney Marsh was the Aldington Gang, named for the Kentish village of the same name but also known as the Blues on account of either their blue clothing or the blue flares they used for signalling. They were active from around 1817 and were invariably heavily armed and didn’t think twice about shooting a revenue man or a blockader. In February 1821, some 250 of them went to the beach at Camber to unload a smuggled cargo. This attracted the attention of the blockaders, a party of which attacked the smugglers and pursued them inland to Brookland, where the Aldington Gang turned and fought in a skirmish that came to be known as the Battle of Brookland. Five men were killed and around twenty wounded, but in the heat of the fighting the gang’s leader, one Cephas Quested, ordered someone to shoot one of the officers of the blockade force. Unfortunately for him, the man he’d given the order to was a blockader not a smuggler, and Quested found himself under arrest; he was subsequently tried and convicted at the Old Bailey and hanged at Newgate.

Subsequently, the gang was taken over by one George Ransley, the landlord of the Bourne Tap pub in Aldington. Under him, the Aldington Gang prospered for several years, landing contraband on the coast between Rye and Deal despite the blockade. Their success came to an end in July 1826 when a blockade officer was killed when he tried to stop the gang running a cargo ashore at the beach at Dover. The government moved fast, and Ransley and several others were arrested in the months that followed. Nineteen of them went on trial at the Maidstone Assizes the following year, and although all of them were found guilty of offences that carried the death penalty their sentences were commuted to transportation; Ransley ended up in Tasmania.

The Aldington Gang were the last of the big smuggler gangs. In 1831, blockade duties for Kent and Sussex became the responsibility of HM Coastguard which had been founded some nine years earlier; this force was well-armed and well-disciplined. There followed various skirmishes between the Coastguard and the smugglers, the last serious one taking place at Pevensey in 1833. By this time, events were turning against the smugglers. Police forces were being established to keep law and order on land, and attitudes such as those expressed by Charles Lamb (see above) were becoming out-dated, for by the dawn of the Victorian age the smuggler was seen not as an honest thief but as a threat to public order. Finally, in the 1840s the government showed its commitment to free trade by slashing import duties, after which smuggling became a somewhat unimportant activity.

But in a sense, it has lived on. The many tales of smuggling on and around Romney Marsh have long provided a source of literary inspiration. Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Sussex for over thirty years, wrote the poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ (“brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk…”) which can be found on the back wall of the Mermaid Inn. 

At around the same time, the Rye-based author Russell Thorndike created the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn – the mild-mannered vicar of the Romney Marsh parish of Dymchurch who also happens to the ruthless leader of the local smuggler gang. This remarkable character first appeared in the novel Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh in 1915. A couple of decades later, Thorndike (an actor as well as an author, and the brother of the actress Sybil Thorndike) returned to the character with six other adventures (Doctor Syn Returns, The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn, etc) which are set prior to the first novel. There was a movie in 1937, starring George Arliss, and another one in 1963 with Patrick MacGoohan.

Thorndike, by the way, wasn’t the only author to be inspired by Rye and the surrounding area. Henry James and E.F. Benson both lived there, while the town is said to have provided Enid Blyton with the setting for her Famous Five adventure Five Go to Smuggler’s Top. John Ryan, the creator of the ineffectual cartoon pirate Captain Pugwash, also lived in Rye (contrary to urban myth, the characters in Captain Pugwash did not have sexually suggestive names).

Although the Doctor Syn novels have long been out of print, Dymchurch’s most famous resident, and probably Romney Marsh’s most famous smuggler (even though he’s fictional), is still celebrated in a biannual event called the ‘Day of Syn’ which takes place at Dymchurch over the August Bank Holiday weekend in even-numbered years. There’s also a steam locomotive named after him on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.

Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 1)

My travels have recently taken me to Romney Marsh, a fascinating part of the world down on the south coast. Low-lying and sparsely populated, it covers around 100 square miles, mostly in Kent but stretching over into Sussex as well.

Romney Marsh – “where the roads wind like streams through pasture and the sky is always three-quarters of the landscape” (according to John Betjeman, and who am I to disagree with him?) – is a large, flat, low-lying and almost empty area with several isolated churches (indicating abandoned or ‘lost’ villages) which was long regarded as both a potential weak point in the event of an invasion from continental Europe – of which more in later posts – and a paradise for smugglers.

Smuggling began in the Middle Ages, and it began with wool, a commodity that formed the backbone of the medieval English economy; it was said that in Europe, the best quality wool came from England. English wool was therefore highly prized by weavers on the continent, and during the reign of Edward I exports of wool were therefore taxed – which is where the smugglers got started, for it was the customs system as introduced in the late thirteenth century that created smuggling. Wool was smuggled out of England via small harbours and beaches, especially on the south-eastern coast which is the closest part of England to mainland Europe. On Romney Marsh – prime sheep-grazing country to the extent that there is still a breed of sheep called the Romney – the smugglers flourished. They became known as ‘owlers’ due to the owl-like noises they used to communicate at night, which was when most of their activities took place, and so the smuggling of wool became known as ‘owling’.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, high export duties and a somewhat ineffective system of control meant that the owlers went more or less unchallenged. A century later, the smuggling of wool out of England was declared to be punishable by death – but did not deter the smugglers, who if anything acquired a more ruthless character, arming themselves to prevent arrest. The customs or revenue men, known as riding officers, were both too few and too poorly-equipped to stop them, though, and Romney Marsh and the various Cinque Ports, along with their accompanying ‘limbs’, got a reputation for lawlessness as a result. This can be seen in the events of 1669, when a man called William Carter, who had set himself up as a smuggler-catcher and managed to get a warrant from Charles II to that effect, arrested the captain of a ship for wool-smuggling and got the magistrate in Folkestone to commit him for trial. However, on arriving in Folkestone with his prisoner, Carter was pelted with stones by the women of the town, who’d been encouraged by the captain’s wife; in the face of such an onslaught, the smuggler-catcher had little option but to let his prisoner go.

Even corrupt officials got involved. This is illustrated by an event that took place in Hythe (one of the five original Cinque Ports) in 1692, when riding officers seized 16 bags of wool in a barn belonging to Julius Deeds, the Mayor of Hythe. Deeds sent his servant, Thomas Birch (who was also a parish constable), to retrieve the wool. He got arrested, and at the subsequent trial the defence tried to argue that the riding officers had acted illegally on the grounds that they had not been accompanied by a parish constable. The prosecution replied that the constable who should have been accompanying them was – you’ve guessed it – Birch himself! Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the wool had been due to be sent to another part of England rather than abroad, and acquitted him. Such instances were not uncommon.

By 1698, the government had resorted to forbidding anyone who lived within 15 miles of the sea in Kent or Sussex from buying wool. In addition to that, all sheep-farmers living within ten miles of the sea in said counties had to account for all of their fleeces for up to three days after shearing. Riding officers were appointed in greater numbers and could call on armed cavalry – dragoons – to help them against the smugglers. Owling persisted, but by the 1720s it was in decline.

But that did not mean an end to smuggling on Romney Marsh.

To be continued…

Historical English crime: A fatal case of mistaken identity

I was recently down in Rye, a lovely old town on the Sussex coast that has a long history as part of the medieval confederation known as the Cinque Ports, as well as many an old tale concerning smugglers and threats of invasion by the French. It’s full of history – the Mermaid pub has a sign saying that it was re-built in 1420 – which simply cannot be avoided as you walk up those cobbled streets to the churchyard at the top of the hill. 

The church, St Mary’s, has wonderful views of the surrounding area should you climb the tower (I, of course, cannot resist the chance to climb a good tower); you can see across Romney Marsh, down to Camber Castle, even to the power station at Dungeness on a clear day, and across to the cliffs by Pett Level – one of my favourite stretches of beach.

  

For any visitor to Rye, the Ypres Tower (pronounced ‘wipers’, just like the way the British soldiers pronounced the name of said Belgian town during the First World War) is well worth a visit for those wishing to find out more about the history of this fascinating place. One of the exhibits is somewhat macabre – it’s a full-size replica human skeleton encased in a gibbet, which was the metal cage in which the body of a condemned criminal was placed after said criminal had died by hanging, to be displayed at a suitable point such as a crossroads in order to warn people of the consequences of breaking the law.

This refers to one of Rye’s most (in)famous stories, that of a local butcher who murdered an ex-mayor of Rye in 1742. The twist is that he killed the wrong man. Not for nothing is it known as the ‘murder by mistake’.

The butcher in question was John Breads, who seems to have been the type to bear a grudge. In particular, he bore a grudge against the mayor of Rye, James Lamb, who’d fined him for selling meat at short weight. This angered Breads to the point at which he came to the conclusion that the best way of settling this grudge was by killing the mayor. Not being particularly subtle, he sometimes spoke about what butchers do to lambs (in an age before refrigeration, they did the slaughtering as well as the butchering) after he’d had a few drinks in the pub.

He got his opportunity on the night of 17^th March 1742. A ship docked at Rye was hosting a banquet and Lamb was invited as the guest of honour. Rye being a small town, it didn’t take long before everyone knew about this. To get from his house to the harbour and back, Lamb would have to walk through the churchyard, and it was here that Breads reckoned he would have his chance to kill him – preferably on the return journey when it would be darker and Lamb might have had a bit too much to drink (local gossip had it that French brandy – smuggled, presumably – would be served at the banquet). In the moonlight, it should be fairly easy to identify the mayor in his red cloak.

Unbeknown to Breads, though, it wasn’t James Lamb who went to the banquet. He’d not been looking forward to it as he wasn’t feeling well but had felt obliged to go because, well, he’d been invited and he was the mayor so it might cause offence if he didn’t go. However, his brother-in-law, a former mayor of Rye called Allen Grebell, popped by to see him in the afternoon and, on being informed that Lamb wasn’t up to it, offered to go in his place – for surely an ex-mayor would add just as much dignity to the occasion as the actual mayor? Lamb readily agreed, and decided that as Grebell would be going to the banquet on his behalf, it was only fitting that he should wear the red mayoral cloak.

Grebell had a lot to drink at the banquet, and was staggering on his way home which took him up the hill and through the churchyard. Seeing a figure in a red cloak and assuming it was Lamb, Breads (who’d been hiding behind a tombstone) attacked, stabbing his victim before fleeing. Grebell did not appear to realise he’d been stabbed – when he got home, he calmly informed his servant that someone had tried to attack him in the churchyard on his way home, and that he would sit down in front of the fire for a while before going to bed. No need for the servant to wait up any longer. What with Grebell wearing Lamb’s red cloak and the only available sources of light being the fire and maybe a lamp or two, the servant didn’t notice that his master was bleeding.

Lamb, meanwhile, was having a troubled night – he had a dream in which his late wife (Grebell’s sister) had appeared to him and warned him about her brother’s safety. Early in the morning, therefore, he decided to see if Grebell was all right. The servant answered the door, and on finding that Grebell’s bed hadn’t been slept in he remembered that Grebell had said he’d sit down by the fire in the front room. The checked the front room, and found Grebell. The ex-mayor had bled to death after falling asleep.

It soon transpired that Breads, who was nothing if not unsubtle, hadn’t fled far from the scene of the crime. He was wandering around the town, drunk, shouting about having killed the mayor. The parish constable found a blood-spattered knife in the churchyard. It had Breads’s name on the handle. The butcher of Rye was quickly arrested and imprisoned in the Ypres Tower.

The subsequent trial took place in May 1743 (actually a couple of months after the murder, as this was when Lady Day, 25^th March, marked the start of the new year in England). It was, apparently, unique in English legal history in that it was the only time when a murder trial was presided over by a judge (Lamb) who had been the defendant’s intended victim. The verdict was never in any doubt – the evidence of the knife and Breads’s behaviour on the morning after were damning, although it still took the jury ten hours before they reached a verdict. Before Lamb passed sentence, Breads left no-one in any doubt with an extraordinary outburst at Lamb: “I did not mean to kill Mr Grebell. It was you I meant it for, and I would murder you now if I could!”

Breads was sentenced to be hanged and, just over a month after the trial, that is what happened. The hanging took place out on the marsh, and afterwards the body was enclosed in a gibbet and left there – at a place known today as Gibbet Marsh.

Gradually, over the next fifty or so years, the bones disappeared as some of the townspeople apparently stole them – local legend has it that, back in the 18^th century, ground-up human bones were regarded as a remedy for rheumatism. When only the skull was left, it was taken to Rye Town Hall where it remains to this day; there are apparently plenty of requests to see it, although the occasional suggestion that it be put on public display is invariably rejected by the council on the grounds that displaying actual human remains wouldn’t be appropriate; tourists can make do with the fake skeleton in the Ypres Tower.

The main source for this story is a booklet called Murder by Mistake, which used to be available for sale at the Ypres Tower but which has now been out of print for many years (I got hold of a copy via eBay), although it was retold in a book called Murders of Old Sussex (of which I happen to own a copy, which stands on my bookshelves next to Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley and Hendon; make of that what you will).

It certainly raises a few questions, the big one being the question of why Lamb was able to officiate at Breads’s trial. Judges are supposed to be impartial, and in this case Lamb – as both the intended victim and a relative of the actual victim – most certainly was not (there’s a reason why the trial is unique in English legal history). Personal connections aside, why would the mayor – the local magistrate – take charge of a murder trial? Serious crimes were meant to be dealt with at the Assizes, those quarterly court sessions that were held in most county towns until well into the 20^th century. Rye being in Sussex, surely Breads should have been sent to Lewes to stand trial at the next Assize session? The reason given for why this was not done is Rye’s status as an ‘Antient Town’ within the Confederation of Cinque Ports, which appears to have exempted Rye from having to send its serious criminals to the Assizes; in the Cinque Ports, everything short of high treason was dealt with locally, with the mayor acting as a judge. The delay between Breads’s arrest and trial (over two months) could have been due to Lamb checking with the powers-that-be with regards to whether he should preside over such a high-profile trial in which he had a personal interest. 

If you ask around in Rye, you’ll find a different take on the town’s most notorious case of mistaken identity. Being an old and somewhat isolated port located on the edge of Romney Marsh, Rye has a long association with smuggling (of which more in a future post) and a local theory is that Lamb was in the pay of a group of smugglers known as the Hawkhurst Gang (who we will return to in said future post). Grebell, so this ‘unofficial’ version goes, found out about the mayor’s corruption and was planning to expose him; Lamb found out about what Grebell knew and planned to have him killed in order to keep him quiet. Breads, a violent man with a known grudge against Lamb, thus became Lamb’s unknowing tool in the elimination of Allen Grebell. Quite how Lamb was able to guarantee that Breads would be waiting with his knife in the churchyard, or even that Grebell would willingly take his place at the banquet, is not clear. But as conspiracy theories go, it’s an interesting one.

Principal sources:
Kenneth M. Clarke, Murder by Mistake (Rye Museum Association, 1975)
Rupert Taylor, Murders of Old Sussex (Countryside Books, 1991)