Xpofer Simpson, a labourer from Thornaby, was discovered strangled near the confluence of the Baydale Beck and the River Tees at Low Coniscliffe. The alarm was raised and Xpofer’s nephew, weaver Ralph Simpson, was seized at Aldborough St John and dragged back to the scene where deputy coroner Francis Raisbie swore in fourteen men as the jury.
They heard that Xpofer and Ralph had been to Gunnerside to buy a little black horse for 10s. Witnesses reported seeing them en route, but ‘before the sunne did arise’, Ralph was spotted alone. Constable Thomas Emerson turned out Ralph’s pockets and found ‘a cord made of throumes (the warp ends of weaver’s web) which was bloody’.
The jury reported: ‘Wee applied the cord to the circle that was about the necke of the party murthered, and it did answer unto the circle; and wee caused the said Ralph to handle the bodye; and upon his handlinge and movinge, the body did bleed both at mouth, nose and eares.’ As Shakespeare said, ‘blood will have blood’ – an old belief that a body would bleed afresh when approached by the murderer.
Due to such incontrovertible proof, Ralph was found guilty. He was hanged at Durham before the week was out, and the balladeers made a fortune selling copies of their new composition, ‘The Baydayle Banckes Tragedy’.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2011)