The Tyburn Jig

My brother was twelve years older so

I knew him not so well,

But heard of him in the taverns,

Getting drunk, and raising hell,

My mother said, ‘Keep away from him,’

And I did, for many years,

But blood is blood, and a brother should

Help out, though it ends in tears.

 

He’d done a spot of embezzling,

He’d picked the pockets of Earls,

You never left him to tend a horse

And he wasn’t safe with girls,

But he was my brother Toby,

And I was his brother Tim,

I’d often find him beneath my bed

When he said, ‘Don’t let them in!’

 

By ‘them’ he had meant the Runners

Who were active in the Bow,

And some of the old Thief-Takers

With their ruffians in tow,

They roamed the streets with their cudgels

And would lie, just out of sight,

Beyond the doors of the Taverns, when

They turned them adrift at night.

 

The streets were mean, and were far from clean

Where my brother used to roam,

Despite the pleas of our mother, who

Would beg him to come back home,

But father remained unbending, said

His eldest son was a swine,

‘His endless scrapes, a Jackanapes!

He is no son of mine!’

 

I heard he’d taken a horse and fled

From a stables in the Strand,

‘There’s little that anyone now can do,

When they catch him, he’ll be hanged!’

My mother, crying a flood of tears

As my father cursed and swore,

‘I’ll call the Runners, or I’ll be damned

If you let him through my door!’

 

So Toby galloped to Hounslow Heath

Along the Great West Road,

Teamed up with the brute Tom Wilmot,

Lay low in his abode,

They’d venture out on a moonlit night

To wait for the latest Stage,

But Tom was never the gentleman,

Or known to contain his rage.

 

They stopped the coach on a lonely night

‘Your money or your life!’

Dragged out a country gentleman,

His maid, and his homely wife,

He wanted the ring on the lady’s hand

But her finger held it tight,

So he sawed the finger off as well

With a sharp, serrated knife.

 

‘It was terrible,’ Toby told me

As they loaded him onto the cart,

‘The screams and the blood, unholy,’

As the horse was about to depart,

They hung him high on the Tyburn Tree

Next to the Wilmot pig,

Not undeserved, but I cried and cursed

As he danced the Tyburn jig.

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Marie]

Well, Toby got what he deserved all right, but that last line was gruesome.