and to represent him as a rapacious negligent Officer, assures his Lordship that those were the Arms of Arragon, with a Canton for Brabant, and that Gregory Brandon was a mean and inconsiderable person. This was true enough; for he was the common Hangman for London and Middlesex. Ralph Brooke afterwards confessed all these circumstances to the Commissioners who represented the Earl Marshal; the consequence of which was, that Garter was, by order of the King, when he heard the case, committed to Prison for negligence, and the Herald for treachery. Be this as we find it, yet was Gregory Brandon the Hangman become a Gentleman, and, as the Bastard says in King John, "could make any Joan a Gentle woman.'

Thus was this Gregory Brandon advanced, perhaps from the state of a Convict, to the rank of a Gentleman; and though it was a personal honour to himself, notwithstanding. it was surreptitiously obtained by the Herald, of which Gregory Brandon, Gentleman, was perhaps ignorant, yet did it operate so much

on his successors in office, that afterwards it became transferred from the Family to the Officer for the time being; and from Mr. Brandon's popularity, though not of the most desirable kind, the mobility soon improved his rank, and, with a jocular complaisance, gave him the title of Esquire, which remains to this day. I have said that Mr. Brandon was perhaps a Convict; for I know that at York the Hangman has usually been a pardoned Criminal, whose case was deemed venial, and for which the performance of this painful duty to fellow-prisoners was thought a sufficient infliction. It seems too as if this Office had once, like many other important Offices of State, been hereditary; but whether Mr. Brandon had it by descent I cannot say, yet Shakspeare has this passage in Coriolanus*: "Menenius.-Marcius, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your Predecessors, since Deucalion; though, peradventure, some of the best of them were Hereditary Hangmen." This looks as if the Office of Executioner

* Act ii. sc. 1.

Z

had run in some Family for a generation or two, at the time when Shakspeare wrote; and that it was a circumstance well understood, and would be well relished, at least by the Galleries. This might indeed, with regard to time, point at the ancestors of Mr. Brandon himself; for it was in the Reign of King James I. that this person was, as we have seen, brought within the pale of Gentility. Nay, more, we are told by Dr. Grey, in his Notes on Shakspeare*, that from this Gentleman, the Hangmen, his Successors, bore for a considerable time his Christian name of Gregory, though not his Arms, they being a personal honour, till a greater man arose, viz. Jack Ketch, who entailed the present official name on all who have hitherto followed him f.

Whether the name of Ketch be not the provincial pronunciation of Catch among the Cockneys, I have my doubts, though I have

* Vol. ii. p. 163.

†The Hangman was known by the name of Gregory in the year 1642, as we learn from the Mercurius Aulicus, p. 553.

printed authority to confront me; for that learned and laborious Compiler, B. E. Gent. the Editor of the Canting Dictionary, says that Jack Kitch, for so he spells it, was the real name of a Hangman, which has become that of all his successors. When this great man lived, for such we must suppose him to have been, and renowned for his popularity or dexterity, Biographical History is silent.

So much for this important Office itself; and we must now look to the Emoluments which appertain to it, and assign a reason why Thirteen Pence Halfpenny should be esteemed the standard Fee for this definitive stroke of the law.

Hogarth has given a fine Picture of the sang-froid of an Executioner in his Print of the London Apprentice; where the Mr. Ketch for the time being is lolling upon the Gallows, and smoaking his Pipe; waiting, with the utmost indifference, for the arrival of the Cart and the Mob that close the melancholy Procession. But Use becomes Nature in things at which even Nature herself revolts.

Before we proceed to matters of a pecuniary

nature, having said so much upon the Executioner, permit me to step out of the way for a moment, and add a word or two on the Executioné, which will explain a Yorkshire saying. It was for the most unsuspected crime imaginable, that the truly unfortunate man who gave rise to the adage suffered the Sentence of the Law at York. He was a Saddler at Bawtry, and occasioned this saying, often applied among the lower people to a man who quits his friends too early, and will not stay to finish his bottle; "That he will be hanged for leaving his liquor, like the Saddler of Bawtry." The case was this: There was formerly, and indeed it has not long been suppressed, an Ale-house, to this day called "The Gallows House," situate between the City of York and their Tyburne; at which House the Cart used always to stop; and there the Convict and the other parties were refreshed with liquors; but the rash and precipitate Saddler, under Sentence, and on his road to the fatal Tree, refused this little regale, and hastened on to the Place of