THE JUDGMENT OF SIMON SHALLOW.

129 from the scene of the supposed murder at the very moment when, if at all, it must have been committed. He was smartly reprimanded, with a counsel to remember what presence he stood in, and bidden to "lay on firm, and not touch the clothes instead of the flesh, as their worships wotted well of that device." The man raised his hand fearlessly, and was about to lay it on the body when a breathless messenger rushed into the justice hall, announcing that a troop of King's officers were riding fast from Oxford with a view of putting a stop to the proceedings, tidings of which had reached that city, where His Majesty then held his court; and threatening the terrors of the law to any magistrate who should be convicted of participation in the illegal course of procedure now in progress. The justices rose in mingled wrath and fear, and in so doing managed to shake the table. Simultaneously with their movement the hand of the accused fell mechanically upon the body, the head of which rolled from its supports, causing an effusion of blood. "Lo, he is guilty!" cried the justices, triumphant in the moment of their apparent defeat. "Men of England!" said one of them (whose park had suffered dreadfully within the past month), "will ye see the laws of your fathers trampled on by a set of evil advisers - chiefly Frenchmen - who have falsely obtained the ear of His Majesty, whom heaven preserve! Will ye have your sons and brothers murdered in cold blood? Ten minutes more and the murderer will be rescued from justice by a set of French lawyers, who will set him free by quirks and quibbles. Now or never is your time to assert your rights. To the nearest oak with him, ere yet the blood is dry, according to the custom of your fathers!" The mob murmured approval: a superstition a thousand years old was dear to them. The keepers and constables clamoured — not one of them but had known the taste of the prisoner's cudgel. The prisoner himself protested, appealed to the King's justice, finally lost his temper and called the justices a pack of murderous noodles. The prisoner had his friends; but they were a disreputable minority of poachers and sheep-stealers. The bulk of the auditory were tenants or retainers of the justices. The approach of horsemen galloping at top speed was announced from a neighbouring hill. If ever a blow could be struck in defence of the old English laws, now was the time. Then, as now, it was a recognised principle that Britons never, never would be slaves, and where is the personal freedom in a country where you cannot hang a man in your own most approved fashion? Briefly, the prisoner was hanged on the nearest oak; and the Royal Commission

A common expedient resorted to by the consciously guilty in the Trial of Ordeal by Touch; similar to that practised by the ignorant of the present day, who think that by "kissing the thumb" instead of the book in a court of justice they evade the legal and sacred responsibilities of an oath.

appointed to investigate the matter, arrived just in time to cut him down and bury him with his lamented friend. Master Shallow was a timorous but by no means an inhuman or an unjust man. He had proposed sparing the culprit whose guilt could scarcely be considered established, seeing that the body had been shaken by the rising of the court, and the flow of blood might have been accidental provided he (the culprit) would make an ample confession of his crime and express his obligation to the magistrates who had tried him, before the King's Commissioners. But this suggestion was overruled by the majority, who declared that there was no time for the consideration of trifling personal interests when they had a great principle to establish. So the convicted murderer was hanged with Master Shallow's full warrant and approval.

It turned out on the evidence of two cowboys, who had witnessed the event, but apparently not thought worth alluding to it until questioned-that the supposed murdered man, being under the obvious influence of malt liquor, had himself staggered over the precipice at the foot of which he had found his death. Master Shallow as chief of the sitting justices (what we should call Chairman of Sessions) was tried by the Royal Commission, and found guilty of murder for putting a man to death by a process long since declared illegal by royal edict. Master Shallow was himself sentenced to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, but King Edward happening to be in one of his periodical money difficulties, the sentence was commuted to a heavy fine which, to the honour of magisterial loyalty and good-fellowship, be it stated, the Gloucestershire justices nobly subscribed to meet. Master Shallow retained his judicial appointment, with a caution to abstain from the trial of criminals by exploded Saxon ordeals for the future, which he carefully observed. Nevertheless he earned lasting renown in the county, as the man who at the imminent risk of his own life had stood up for the maintenance of a great national institution. The Shallows, on the establishment of coat armour by Edward the Third, assumed in honour of this event the device of a man pendant on an oak branch, salient, in a field of green, proper. But some misconception arising in the public mind as to this being meant to represent an episode in the personal history of one of the family, the design was abandoned, and the traditional "dozen white luces," (the origin of which is enveloped in mystery,) by which the house is still identified at the Heralds' College, adopted in its place. It may not be irrelevant to state that the two over-officious cowboys were speedily selected, on the press-warrant of Master Shallow, to supply a deficiency in King Edward's army- and perished nobly, fighting their country's battles, in one of that monarch's numerous expeditions against the disaffected Scots.

THE SHALLOWS, PAST AND PRESENT.

131

The Shallows continued to merit renown by their resistance on all possible occasions to anything like innovation in the administration of justice. own Robert Shallow, at an advanced period of life, was only induced by serious remonstrances from King Henry the Fifth (for whom he was wont to express the strongest regard, having been very intimate with his grandfather) to desist from the ancient practice of trying aged women for the crime of witchcraft by launching them in deep water upon sieves,-when, if they went to the bottom and proved their earthly nature by remaining there for five or ten minutes, they were pronounced innocent and permitted to come to the surface and return to their homes at their earliest convenience on the other hand, if they did not immediately sink, they were considered to be in league with the powers of darkness and taken out to be burnt. Throughout subsequent reigns the Shallows were remarkable for their indefatigable enforcement of the Game Laws, and of the measures enacted for the punishment of "masterless men," that is, of persons wandering in search of employment—an offence which even in the present day is treated by their descendants with greater rigour than any other.

Representatives of the house of Shallow-with the name variously modified abound in our own time. They are to a man somehow connected with the amateur administration of justice. They are to be found in the country digging up obsolete enactments for the committal to imprisonment and hard labour of agricultural journeymen who may be disposed to treat themselves to a day's holiday. They are the terror of itinerant showmen, unemployed mechanics and poachers, by whom they are hated. On the other hand they have the enthusiastic support of the genuine criminal population, to whose professional exertions they are by no means obstructive. They are learned in the rights of rabbits and know a greater variety of legal torture for avenging the unlicensed death of one of that favoured species than a French cook could invent receipts for disguising its carcase. You will find them trying strange experiments with pet convicts in model prisons, and actively throwing impediments in the way of government inquiries into the conduct of brutal governors of those institutions too often the hot ploughshares and ordeals by touch of modern criminal jurisprudence. Little opportunities of serving a friend like this are of course due to the country Shallows as an offset to their gratuitous services. As one of the earliest of the family counsellors has expressed it, "Heaven save but a knave should have some countenance at his friend's request; an honest man, Sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave cannot." Their worships are further privileged to carry out this principle by limiting, within their jurisdiction, the knavery of keeping open houses for the sale of injurious tipples at

exorbitant prices, to such knaves, only, as they may consider "entitled to some countenance at their friends' request." In London-where some of the fraternity are permitted to exercise their functions within certain limits their most conspicuous public achievements are an annual out-door masquerade of obsolete meaning, strongly reminding us of their ancestor Robert's appearance as "Sir Dagonet in Arthur's Show". and certain frantic but hitherto unsuccessful attempts to put down pitch-and-toss, polkas, and suicide practices which still continue prevalent in the British metropolis.

Of the personal character of Master Robert Shallow, the worthy representative of this race and order in Sir John Falstaff's time, some glimpse has possibly been obtained from an early chapter of this work. Sir John at the advanced period of life to which I have now brought him, remembered the justice "at Clement's Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese paring; when he was naked he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: he was so forlorn" (I am quoting Sir John's own words) "that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible ; he was the very genius of famine; he came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the over-scutched huswives that he had heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. And now is this Vice's dagger become a squire; and talks as familiarly of John of Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him; and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the Tilt-yard; and then he burst his head for crowding amongst the marshal's men. I saw it, and told John of Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have trussed him and all his apparel into an eel skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court, and now he hath land and beeves!"

Considering that, when Sir John Falstaff made these reflections upon the past and present of Master Robert Shallow, nearly fifty years had elapsed since the events alluded to, it will be admitted that our knight's recollection of the passage in the Tilt-yard (with which my readers are familiar) and the substance of the witticism it evoked from him at the time, prove his memory to have been at least unimpaired. It is strange that Sir John should marvel at Master Shallow's possession of land and beeves. It will be found through all ages that the Shallows have had an eye to the main-chance, which it is very rarely indeed you find a fool neglecting. A mole may have very small eyes, but he is not quite blind. He is dazzled by pure daylight, it is true, and may never see a flower. But he is an excellent judge of dirt, which is to him the great necessary of life, and he will never lose sight of the importance of keeping a sufficient heap of it about him.

HALT AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

133

V

VISIT TO JUSTICE SHALLOW's.

Mr supposition that Sir John Falstaff was indebted for his knowledge of Mr. Shallow's existence, whereabouts, and prosperous condition, to some such accidental renewal of his acquaintance with Mr. Doit, of Staffordshire, as I have imagined, is strengthened in probability by the certainty that our knight really did meet with the latter-named gentleman, and at Coventry, within a few days anterior to the date which my historical calculations have decided me in assigning to the battle of Gualtree Forest. This is proved by a letter from Mr. Doit, discovered among the Falstaff papers on the knight's decease, apparently one of a numerous series, in which the writer somewhat sharply requests payment of a certain "obligacion" which he has held for some time in acknowledgment of monies advanced by him to Sir John on the occasion of their happy "reknitting of their old fellowship" at Coventry, "which honour," Master Doit sarcastically observes, "albeit of great price, is one I had not been so prodigal as to purchase with fore-knowledge that it would cost me the sum it is like to," to wit, fifteen pounds eight shillings, the amount of the said " obligacion," which is mentioned as bearing the date of the 7th of June, 1410.

Be the origin of the event as it may, Sir John's visit to the domain of Justice Shallow is matter of public history. The Falstaff troops marched from Coventry to Stratford-on-Avon, between which town and Evesham the justiciary seat of the Shallows was situate, and there halted.

It may be thought that an event so suggestive as a visit from Sir John Falstaff to Stratford-on-Avon-the future birthplace of his greatest historian, but for whose genius it is possible that the name and achievements of our knight would have lapsed into an oblivion from which not even these affectionate pages (which, of course, would have been written under any circumstances) could have rescued them— might be made the text for much instructive and entertaining reflection. But cui bono? It is to be hoped that the character and objects of this work are now sufficiently understood to acquit the writer of any suspicion of a tendency to digress from the iron road of facts into the flowery groves of fanciful speculation. The fact, that Sir John Falstaff passed through Stratford-on-Avon, more than a hundred years before the birth of William Shakspeare, can scarcely have had any influence upon the dramatist's after labours in connection with the warrior's history. It is true, that Sir