A Down's Story

One of the saddest stories ever told is told of Old Shoreham Churchyard.

 

Tennyson was much moved by it and put it into verse. The story that impressed Tennyson was printed in a penny magazine about Old Brighton which a friend and neighbour lent the poet to read. It arose out of a robbery of the mail, for which a boy was hanged on the gibbet at Brighthelmstone, on the down between Brighton and Shoreham.

 

Tennyson makes the dying mother tell the story to a lady who has come to sit by her. Nay-for it's kind of you, Madam, to sit by an old dying wife. But say nothing hard of my boy; I have only an hour of life. I kissed my boy in the prison, before he went out to die.

 

" They dared me to do it," he said, and he never has told me a lie. The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been one of his best. But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good; They swore that he dare not rob the mail, and he swore that he would; And he took no life, but he took one purse, and when all was done He flung it among his fellows - I'll none of it, said my son.

 

The sternness of the law brought the mother's son to the gibbet. He was hung in chains for highway robbery, and his body was left on the gallows at the mercy of the elements, as was done in the good old days of the 18th century. There, on the downs through the heat of summer and the storms of winter, stood the gallows with its ghastly burden, beaten by wind and rain, at the mercy of the fowls of the air.

Night after night in winter, when the wind swept across the lonely downs and the ghastly burden of the gallows was breaking up, a poor woman groped for the body of her son. Night after night she searched the downs for the bones scattered by the wind and rain; she collected them and took them home and kept them until the gibbet had lost the whole of its horrible burden.

Then when there was nothing more to fall from the creaking chains, which had been her only guide in the darkness of the downs, the poor mother went one night with all that was left of her son and laid the bones in Old Shoreham Churchyard.

 

 

 

 

 

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