I might have voted guilty with the rest of the jury in the Perry trial, even though one of the defendants had been charged with being a witch, and I don’t believe in witches. That was Joan Perry. And she was hanged first. The authorities were hoping the older boy, Richard, freed from Joan's witchcraft, would confess. But he did not. Which leaves me to wonder if being a witch was just an ‘eggcorn’ for that other crime women are often accused of. And then to everyone’s surprise, after Richard, too, was dead, the youngest boy, John, whose confession had led to the execution of his entire family, recanted. Still the judges remained certain. So John was duly hanged as well. If I had been the judge, I like to think that John's recantation would have led me to have second thoughts. Of course, by then it a little was too late. (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/eggcorn.html)
The story behind the trial takes place in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswold of England. "Chipping" is an old Welsh word for market, and “wold” is Welsh for an upland meadow, so this was a market town amidst the rolling limestone hills and open fields which were once the property of the Saxon King, Harold.
Under the Normans it became sheep country. In 1340, in Chipping Camden, the wool merchants were already so wealthy they built a hall on the High Street, using the honey-colored “Cotswold stone” as facing.
Even today Chipping Camden looks as if it were untouched since the middle ages. In fact, this western corner of England was a violent incubator for the industrial revolution.
It is human nature that wealth surrounded by poverty requires a justification. So it was no accident then that the Nuevo-rich Calvinist wool merchants in the Cotswold welcomed a belief in predestination – the certainty that they were wealthy and successful because God predestined them to be wealthy and successful before they had even been born. Thus the will of the successful was God’s will. Of this the Calvinists were certain. And they were certain that opposing them was to oppose God’s will.
Thus, in 1649, after seven years of civil war, these dead-certain Calvinists were comfortable in beheading their intransigent King, and suspected Catholic, Charles I. But the Calvinist experiment in government came to an end on January 1st, 1660 when soldiers under Colonel George Monck crossed the River Tweed at the village of Coldstream, thus earning the regiment supporting the restoration of the monarchy the eternal and future title “The Coldstream Guards”.
A month later they were in London, and in late April Charles Stuart, son of the last King of England, was crowned Charles II, the next King of England. But if anybody thought the restoration of the monarchy was going to return a certain stability to Britain, they were about to suffer a very rude awakening.
Three months later, on Thursday, 16 August, 1660, the estate manager for a wealthy Calvinist merchant left his home in Chipping Camden, tasked to walk the two miles to the village of Charingworth. His name was William Harrison and he must have been an amazing fellow, as he was already 70 years old, and facing an eight mile hike to collect rents for his merchant master and return home by dark; except, he did not return.
At about 9 p.m. his servant, John Perry, was sent out to look for the old man at Charingworth and Paxford. The next morning Harrison’s son went out to search for them both. The son found John Perry, who explained he had been looking all night for Mr. Harrison - and his purse filled with collected rents. Together they continued looking, and later that morning found William Harrison’s hat, slashed by a knife, and his shirt, caked in blood.
Suspicion quickly fell on Harrison's servant , John Perry. Over several days of constant questioning and torture, John Perry told several stories but finally admitted he had suggested his own mother and brother should rob Mr Harrison and then murder him. And even though Joan and Richard both insisted on their innocence, the investigators felt certain that John had not lied, since he had implicated himself . No sane person would admit to that, even under torture. Ponds and streams and wells were searched for poor Mr. Harrison's body, or the rents he had collected. No trace of the old man or the money was found. The Perry family were held over the winter for trial.
On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, fifty lunatics (most of them ex-soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s Calvinist army), calling themselves Fifth Monarchists, stormed into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and started roughing people up. They shot one poor fellow who talked back to them. They were preparing the way, they said, for the return of Jesus Christ, whom they intended to crown the next King of England. It took an armed band of militia to chase the loonies out of the church.
Three days later the same loonies stormed a prison and tried to free the prisoners. None of the prisoners was insane enough to follow the fanatics. They stayed in their cells. This time it took the loyal Coldstream guards to trap the loonies in a couple of taverns. Muskets and the bayonet, finished off the religious revolutionaries. The leaders were captured, tried for treason, hanged, drawn and quartered. It seemed there was such an air of un-certainty hanging over England, the citizens had become inspired to begin to demand certainty. And these loonies at least were certainly dead.
In April of 1661 the Perry family were brought to trial and duly hanged, one after the other. And if there were second thoughts after John's gallows conversion to innocence, they were put aside.
For even if Joan and Richard Perry had not killed poor Mr. Harrison, then John Perry, the self confessed murderer, certainly had. - even if he had recanted. And it was certainly important that justice was seen to be done. than that un-certainly be tolerated. Without the certain avenging hand of justice there would be no respect for the law, and English society would return to the rule of the beast, the rule of eat or be eaten. And then in 1662, wonder of wonders, William Harrison walked back into to the village of Chipping Camden, certainly alive and allegedly well.
When questioned the old man (he was now seventy-two) told a murky tale of being set upon, stabbed, kidnapped, hustled aboard a ship, and sold in a Turkish slave market. He escaped, he said, when his new master died. Mr. Harrison claimed he then caught a ship back to England. As others have noted, “The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false.” And as a Mr. Paget noted, “much profit was not likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave…especially as the old man was delivered in a wounded and imperfect condition.”
So where did Mr. Harrison disappear to in the summer of 1660? Given that transportation in that age was mostly limited to “shanks mare”, William Harrison might have walked far enough that no one would recognize him, But he must have been close enough to Chipping Camden to have heard, in the eight months after his disappearance, of the trial and the hanging sentence of his accused murderers. And yet the old man did not return to save those three lives.
But why did Mr. Harrison wait two years to return? Why not sooner? Why did Harrison return at all? And why did John Perry tell such wild tales? Why did he send his own mother and brother to the gallows? Why did he not recant until the last moments of his life? Could torture, the standard method used for questioning at the time, have produced false testimony? Perhaps. Perhaps the human soul is the real mystery, and not certain at all,
In the end, all we know for certain is that John Perry, Richard Perry and Joan Perry were slowly strangled at the end of a rope, as punishment for a crime which they did not commit and which never happened. Every thing else about this case is a mystery and a wonder. It is the Camden Wonder.
It is a wonder that, 300 years later, juries remain so certain that they continue to take the lives of those accused, when they have no earthly reason to be so certain, and certainly no heavenly justification either.
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