Chapter 3

THE "HAND OF GLORY"—LIABILITY OF COUNTRY DISTRICTS FOR
ROBBERIES—EXEMPTION IN RESPECT OF SUNDAY TRAVELLING

Those far-distant, unpleasant days when "highway lawyers," and entirely
unromantic bands of robbers, murderers, and footpads swarmed over the
country, and robbed and slew with comparatively little fear of the law,
were also extremely superstitious days. Good men and bad were alike
steeped in a degrading belief in white and black magic, portents, and
omens. Magical aids in the prosecution of both innocent and guilty
enterprises were employed; and among them none more fearful than the
charm known generally as the "Hand of Glory": the "open sesame" of
thieves and assassins, among whom, it is to be feared, we must include
not a few of our "romantic" highwaymen; although probably the larger
number of them would actually have felt themselves insulted at being
styled thieves, and certainly only a minority slew wilfully. Most
desired nothing so little as to shed blood, in spite of the terrible
alternative they threatened—"Your money, or your life!"

But among the thieves and the murderous the superstition of the "Hand
of Glory" was widely prevalent. It appears to have originally derived
from mediæval Germany, that storehouse of terrible imaginings. What the
"Hand of Glory" was, and the effect it produced, may be seen better by
the following quotation from the _Ingoldsby Legends_, which is one of
the most genuinely thrilling passages in literature. It is full of the
most dreadful description, but exquisitely done:

On the lone bleak moor, At the midnight hour,
Beneath the Gallows Tree,
Hand in hand The Murderers stand,
By one, by two, by three!
And the moon that night With a grey, cold light,
Each baleful object tips;
One half of her form Is seen through the storm,
The other half's hid in Eclipse!
And the cold wind howls, And the Thunder growls,
And the Lightning is broad and bright;
And altogether It's very bad weather,
And an unpleasant sort of a night!
"Now mount who list, And close by the wrist,
Sever me quickly the Dead Man's fist!
Now climb who dare Where he swings in air,
And pluck me five locks of the Dead Man's hair!"

The dried hand, thus obtained, was fitted with wicks, one to each
finger and the thumb, made from the five locks of hair dipped in grease
from the murderer's own body and the fat of a black tom cat, and
generally consecrated with the saying of the Lord's Prayer, backwards.
When all these wicks were lighted, and the blazing Hand of Glory
carried into a house, a spell was supposed to be cast on place and
inmates, in which the malefactor could work his will:

"Now open lock To the Dead Man's knock!
Fly bolt, and bar, and band!
Nor move, nor swerve, Joint, muscle, or nerve,
At the spell of the Dead Man's hand!
Sleep, all who sleep!—Wake, all who wake!—
But be as the Dead, for the Dead Man's sake!"

Traditions not so long since surviving in the North Riding of Yorkshire
tell a horrid story of the use of an enchanted hand of this kind. One
wild and bitter night—the sort of night when homeless wayfarers were
more than usually to be pitied—a man clad in ragged clothes knocked at
the door of a lone inn on a solitary moor, and asked for a lodging.
There was no accommodation to spare, but as the night was so inclement
and the way was long to the next house, he was told that if he liked,
he might lie in the front of the kitchen fire. He accepted this offer
with every appearance of thankfulness, and soon after, when the family
had gone to bed, he was left there. But although the innkeeper and his
family had retired and left the stranger alone, the servant was still
engaged for a few minutes in another room which chanced to command a
view of the kitchen. Happening to glance in that direction, she was at
first astonished, and then horrified, to find that the stranger had
risen up from the floor and had seated himself at the table where she
saw him take a shrivelled, mummified hand from his pocket, set it up,
and then, one by one, light the fingers. The girl rushed upstairs
to warn her master of these extraordinary doings, but she found him
and his family all already in a charmed sleep. It was impossible to
arouse them; and here she found herself alone in the house with the
evil-intentioned stranger and his uncanny movements. She quietly
went downstairs again and saw the beggarman exploring the house and
collecting articles that appeared to him worth taking. Still on the
kitchen table burnt the four fingers of the Hand of Glory, in blue,
sickly flames; but the thumb was not burning. To that fact was due the
circumstance that one person in the house remained unaffected by the
spell.

Stealing on noiseless feet into the kitchen, she blew upon the Hand,
but could not blow it out. She poured beer over it, but the Hand only
seemed to burn better. She tried water, but that appeared to have no
effect, one way or the other. Then she emptied the milk-jug over it.
Immediately the place was in darkness, except for the glow of the
kitchen-fire. The spell was instantly removed, the sleepers awakened,
and the robber seized and afterwards tried and hanged.

Harrison Ainsworth, revelling as always in the horrible, gives us
his version of the Hand of Glory in _Rookwood_. In this variant you
recognise the nastiness of it, rather than the horror:

From the corse that hangs on the roadside tree
(A murderer's corse it needs must be)
Sever the right hand carefully:—
Sever the hand that the deed hath done,
Ere the flesh that clings to the bones be gone;
In its dry veins must blood be none.
Those ghastly fingers, white and cold,
Within a winding-sheet enfold;
Count the mystic count of seven;
Name the Governors of Heaven,
Then in earthly vessel place them,
And with dragon-wort encase them;
Bleach them in the noon-day sun,
Till the marrow melt and run,
Till the flesh is pale and wan.
As a moon-ensilver'd cloud—
As an unpolluted shroud.
Next within their chill embrace
The dead man's awful candle place;
Of murderer's fat must that candle be,
(You may scoop it beneath the roadside tree)
Of wax and of Lapland sesame.
Its wick must be twisted of hair of the dead,
By the crow and her brood on the wild waste shed.
Wherever that terrible light shall burn,
Vainly the sleeper may toss and turn;
His leaden lids shall he ne'er unclose
So long as that magical taper glows.
Life and treasure shall he command,
Who knoweth the charm of the Glorious Hand!
But of black cat's gall let him aye have a care,
And of screech-owl's venomous blood beware.

The ancient condition of Merry England was a despotic rule tempered
by rebellion and highway robbery, in which the Barons revolted from
time to time against kingly encroachments, and the peasantry were
generally at odds with both those estates. The woodland tracts that
then overspread the greater part of the country were filled with
outlaws, of whom Robin Hood, as we have already seen, was a sublimated
idealisation, and in those tangled thickets a man, or a body of men,
might lurk and exist for years, subsisting upon the deer whom it was
then, under the old forest laws, mutilation and death to slay. But with
the law already arrayed against them, the outlaws who had been deprived
of the very few rights a man of the peasant class might then own, cared
little for the fearful penalties that awaited those who took a fat buck
and converted it into venison, and valued not at all the punishments
that awaited the highway robber. A man proscribed for some offence, who
had then taken to the woods of necessity, might even, for sheer love of
the life, elect to remain in them for sport; for the sporting instinct
has ever been deeply implanted in the character of the English race,
without respect of class. It is largely the sporting instinct, and not
so much the actual worth of the quarry, that makes the modern poacher
brave the keepers of the squire's preserves.

It was but a step from specialising in unlawful chase of the deer to
robbing travellers. The deer-stealers were already Ishmaels, before
they had dared so greatly, and they were doubly outlawed after so
boldly usurping the hunting prerogatives of kings and nobles. What
mattered, then, the taking of a purse; nay, even of a life?

The Legislature early attempted to put pressure upon local authorities,
to secure the arrest of robbers, and, as usual, the pressure was
exercised through that most vulnerable part, the pocket, the
"Achilles' heel" of civilisation. The country (often in later years
we find it "the county") was supposed to be responsible for good
governance, and if the country was unfortunate enough to be infested
with robbers, it was expected to arrest them; or failing that, to be
financially answerable for their robberies. We find this specifically
provided for by Act of Parliament in 1285, and again in 1354.

But it was impossible in those times, in the sparsely populated
country, to suppress robbers, and the rural districts suffered severely
in pocket as a result of bold pillaging in the day-time.

In 1509 Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk, is found nervous of
sending gold to London, and telling her husband, then staying in town,
that a sum of twenty marks had been paid for a ward, but that the
person who paid it "dare not aventure her money to be brought up to
London for feere of robbyng; for it is seide heere that there goothe
many thefys be twyx this and London." He was therefore to have the
money at his coming home.

The county division known as "the hundred" was the area responsible
and liable to reimburse losses occasioned in this manner. Thus, _inter
alia_, we find the Hundred of Benhurst, in Berkshire, continually
assessed to make good the losses sustained by travellers, along what is
now the Bath Road, through Maidenhead Thicket, a place whose ill repute
was second only to that of Hounslow Heath. By an Act of Parliament of
1585 (27 Elizabeth c. 13, s. 2) the sum recoverable from the hundreds
was limited to half the travellers' loss. The reasons given for this
limitation were the distress and impoverishment of the inhabitants
by reason of these frequent and severe levies upon their purses. It
is evidence of the extraordinary increase of highway robbery at that
period. Five years after this enactment, the Hundred of Benhurst paid
£255 compensation for robberies committed in the Thicket.

Even so, the liability of the country, the county, or the hundred, had
always been limited to robberies committed in daylight. "Between sun
and sun," _i.e._ between the setting of the sun and the next morning's
sunrise, the highwaymen might work double tides and plunder as they
would, and no action for damages would lie against the inhabitants.

Nor could travellers who were robbed on Sunday have any redress.
It was particularly enacted by the statute of 1676, known as the
Sunday Trading Act, that any one travelling on the Lord's Day did so
entirely at his own risk, and was barred from bringing an action.
"But nevertheless," the section continues, "the inhabitants of the
counties and hundreds (after notice of such robbery to them, or some
of them, given, or after hue-and-cry for the same to be brought) shall
make or cause to be made fresh suit and pursuit after the offenders,
with horsemen and footmen, according to the statute made in the
twenty-seventh year of Queen Elizabeth, upon pain of forfeiting to the
King's Majesty, his heirs and successors, as much money as might have
been recovered against the hundred by the party robbed, if this had not
been made."