DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

(= 3 management fostered instead of checking crime. Nowadays, by a careful classification of prisoners, young offenders are precluded from making the con- taminating acquaintance of incorrigible criminals ; and hard by the doors of most prisons are refuges where discharged prisoners are received, and placed in the way of earning an honest livelihood in the future. Even in the beginning of this century such offences as forgery and sheep-stealing were punished with death ; and some of those present may perhaps remember the days when men and women were subjected to the cruel and degrading penance of the stocks. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 rebels were disembowelled before they were hanged. Men were pressed to death so late as the middle of the last century, when on being cross-questioned they refused to give evidence ; and up to the same date wives who murdered their husbands were condemned to be burnt alive. Judicial cruelty was equalled by the barbarity of popular pastimes. Bear-baiting, which had been popular in the time of Elizabeth, had gone out of fashion, but bull-baiting existed until the last generation. At Stamford it was a common recrea- tion of the people to bait a mad bull through the streets. Cock-fighting, a still more cruel amuse- ment, survived until lately. At the beginning of this century it was the pastime of high and low.