Nobody objected to the gypsies who regularly used Sutton Lane, near Sutton Benger, as their camping ground. Yet one of the gypsies, Edward Buckland – or Buckley as he was sometimes known – was so universally reviled that his own tribe had disowned him because of his evil behaviour. Thus Ted tended to travel the area alone, sleeping under hedges or occasionally in barns when the local farmers took pity on him.
By 1820, Ted was sixty-six years old. A swarthy man, with black hair, grey whiskers and a long beard, he was usually dressed in a dirty old blanket, which he tied around his waist with string.
In the late spring of that year, Ted knocked on the door of Brookside Cottage. The owner, fifty-eight-year-old widow Judith Pearce, who worked at nearby Church Farm, had been known to give Ted a crust of bread in the past. However, on that day, Ted wanted more than just food and asked if he could come into the cottage and warm himself in front of the fire. Not surprisingly, Mrs Pearce refused. Ted went away angry and, later that evening, the thatched roof of the cottage caught fire.
The flames were thankfully extinguished before too much damage was done and it was widely believed that Ted Buckland had started the fire to get his own back on Mrs Pearce for refusing to let him inside her cottage. Ted was quickly apprehended, but he managed to escape his captors and prudently left the area.
Ted was not seen around Sutton Benger again until mid-November 1820. On 12 November, he knocked on the door of a cottage owned by Mrs Ann Flowers, begging for clothes. Mrs Flowers found him a coat and some breeches that had belonged to her husband.
The High Street, Sutton Benger. (Author’s collection)
The argument with Buckland earlier in the year had thoroughly unnerved Judith Pearce, hence her twelve-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Cottle, had moved in with her to keep her company. In the early hours of the morning of 13 November, Judith and Elizabeth were asleep in Brookside Cottage when they were disturbed by the sound of somebody trying to get into the house.
The frightened woman and child barred the kitchen door then watched in terror as the intruder began to hack through it with an axe. In desperation, Judith Pearce managed to break through the thin lath wall of the cottage and the two escaped through the hole in the wall, into the garden. The intruder followed. He knocked Mrs Pearce down and grabbed Elizabeth, who somehow managed to wriggle free from his grasp. The girl ran as fast as she could through the darkness to her great-uncle’s house in the village and roused the occupants. As she was blurting out her story, the church clock struck three.
The girl’s two uncles, William and Thomas, her aunt and two neighbours, Daniel Powell and John Price, hurried back to Brookside Cottage, where they found Judith Pearce lying dead in the garden. At a later post-mortem examination, conducted by Dr Joseph Hayward, it was discovered that she had four wounds to her head, caused, the doctor theorised, by her being hit with a blunt instrument. Nothing had been stolen from the house.
The police were called and an immediate search was initiated for Ted Buckland. Not that he took much finding as, early on the morning after Mrs Pearce’s death, he was found cooking his breakfast at the side of Sutton Lane. He was immediately arrested and taken before Mr Coleman, the magistrate at Langley Fitzurze, who committed him to stand trial for the wilful murder of Judith Pearce at the next Wiltshire Assizes.
About three weeks after Buckland’s arrest, the Bath Herald printed an anonymous poem about the murder, clearly assuming that Buckland was guilty, even though his trial had not yet taken place and he was presumed innocent until proven otherwise in the eyes of the law.
A lonely cottage stands beside the way;
A white thatched cot, with honeysuckle gay;
There JUDITH PEARCE, a widow lived alone,
By a rough quarry of blue-coloured stone;
Where lurked a wretch of Egypt’s wandering race,
A wretch forlorn, without a mask of grace,
Whom ruffians left, for such a rogue was he,
That even the vilest shunned his company;
Dark was his face but darker still his mind,
To pity, and to every tender feeling blind.
He had no friends, nor knew the joys of home,
But muttering through the dews of night would roam,
Brooding on fancied wrongs with secret pride,
On words, or looks, or benefits denied.
Round his gaunt side a rope for girdle swung,
From which a light, short-handled hatchet hung;
A tattered garment did the village fright,
A coat by day, a blanket all the night,
Which round his neck a butcher’s skewer confin’d,
Fit fastening such a filthy dress to bind.
JUDITH had often a kind warning given,
How far his ways were from the ways of Heaven;
And once too, JUDITH (which would kindle strife
In greater persons) asked him –Where’s your wife?
Once fire denied, a common courtesy;
Yet there seemed danger in his quick black eye;
And so there was, for as she lay in bed,
At night the thatch was blazing o’er her head.
And EDWARD BUCKLAND, so the villain call,
Was met in haste, close to the village wall;
And if as on some villainy he mused,
The evening salutation he refused;
Suspected, taken, he escapes at last,
And all supposed the danger now was past –
When Judith’s brother, in the dead of night,
Heard his grand-niece who shook with cold and fright,
Tell how she ‘scaped the murderer’s hand by flight;
‘Wake! Wake! She’s murdered!’ was the frightful cry;
‘I heard the blow! I almost saw her die.’
They found her lying in the garden mould,
Mangled with dreadful wounds, quite dead and cold.
A sight to shock the weak and almost scare the bold.
Memorial stone for Judith Pearce, which replaced the original weathered stone. (© N. Sly)
It would have been almost impossible to find anyone to serve on the trial jury that had not previously read the poem and, as a result, formed an opinion on Buckland’s guilt.
Buckland’s trial opened at Salisbury in March 1821, before Mr Justice Holroyd. The proceedings were constantly interrupted by insane outburst from the accused. Elizabeth Cottle positively identified Buckland as the man who had attacked her and her grandmother, even though it would have been pitch dark at the time and she freely admitted that she hadn’t seen her attacker too clearly.
Ann Flowers testified that the coat and breeches that she had given to Buckland had been spotlessly clean. Constable Richard Ellery, who had arrested the prisoner, testified to finding blood and dirt on the clothes, the dirt matching the wattle and daub from the walls of Judith Pearce’s cottage.
Almost three months after the murder, Thomas Ferris, the landlord of the Bell Inn, had found a hatchet in a brook in the village. William Greenwood, from nearby Christian Malford, professed to recognise the axe as one that Ted Buckland had tried to persuade him to exchange for a capful of potatoes. Greenwood told the court that he recognised the hatchet as the one that Buckland had tried to swap for potatoes by some letters on the handle. (This was in spite of the fact that Greenwood was completely unable to read or write!) ‘May I be damned to everlasting if I had anything to do with the hatchet,’ protested Buckland.
He continued to protest his innocence throughout the trial, saying, ‘I’ll swear upon ten thousand books that I never killed that woman!’ However the jury took absolutely no notice and, less than one minute after retiring, returned a verdict of ‘Guilty’.
Buckland was executed on 17 March 1821 at Fisherton Anger, the site of the old Wiltshire county gaol, an area now absorbed into Salisbury. It was a double execution, with Buckland, still protesting his innocence, joined on the scaffold by John Asher, who had murdered Patrick MacKay at the Bull Inn, Warminster.
The evidence against Buckland was largely circumstantial, although the fact that nothing was taken from Judith Pearce’s home does seem to suggest that someone with a personal grudge against her committed her murder. Since she was known to be a Christian woman of impeccable character, who was well liked by all who knew her, it is difficult to imagine anyone other than Buckland having a motive for the killing. Yet one thing about the case remains puzzling. If Buckland really did kill Judith Pearce, then why was he found calmly cooking his breakfast so close to the crime scene only hours after the murder? If he were the murderer, it seems inconceivable that he should remain in the area, unless he was either so stupid that he just didn’t believe that he would ever be connected with her death or so confident that he would be able to talk his way out of trouble. Or was it possible that he knew nothing at all about the murder and was completely unaware that Judith Pearce had been killed?
A frightened child, whom he had attacked in the pitch dark, had verified Buckland’s identity, even though she had not seen her attacker clearly. His association with a hatchet, which may or may not have been the murder weapon, was based on identification of letters on its handle by a man who could not read. And his guilt was publicly recorded in the anonymous poem released long before his trial.