On the hot summer morning of 3 July 1828, the hay field was buzzing with rumours about Sarah Baker, who had apparently been unfaithful to her husband some twelve months previously. Unfortunately, the idle gossip reached the ears of Sarah’s husband, Nicholas, who promptly stormed home in a rage to find out the identity of the scoundrel who had lain down with his wife.
At about two o’clock that afternoon, Nicholas Baker knocked at the door of the house of his neighbours, Sarah and Thomas Tuck, and told them that a sad misfortune had befallen him. He would not have had it happen for £200, he said, but he had been beating his wife and now feared that she was dead.
Sarah and Thomas Tuck, along with James Buscombe, who was visiting them at the time, hastened to the Baker’s home, where they found Sarah sitting up in a chair, wearing nothing but a clean shift and a pair of stockings. She had horrific bruising around her neck and Sarah Tuck later described her badly beaten face as looking ‘like a piece of liver’. She was dead.
James Buscombe was immediately despatched to try and find a doctor, Baker followed him a few yards up the road and said, ‘Jem, thee wilt be called upon at trial; say the woman was alive when thee came into the house.’ Buscombe said that he would do no such thing, telling Baker, ‘Thee will be hanged if thee hast a hundred necks.’ Baker returned home looking crestfallen. Buscombe had not been walking for long when he met the local surgeon, Mr Edward Spencer, riding his horse along the lane. He led Spencer back to the Baker’s home.
When the surgeon arrived, Nicholas Baker had moved his wife from the chair onto the floor, where he had laid her on two sacks. He appeared to have washed the body and attempted to straighten her hair, which Sarah Tuck had noticed was ‘very much pulled about’ when she first saw the dead woman. Now, Baker was kneeling on the floor, knotting a handkerchief around his wife’s jaws to keep her mouth closed.
Lacock village. (Author’s collection)
Mr Spencer examined the body and found two small, contused wounds on the back of Mrs Baker’s head. Although her skull wasn’t fractured, a large quantity of blood had collected between her brain and her skull and, in Spencer’s opinion, this was what had caused her death. In addition, Mrs Baker had extensive blackened bruising to her face, neck, chest, shoulders and upper arms.
Spencer asked Nicholas Baker what had happened and Baker admitted that he had beaten his wife in a fit of jealousy, having heard a woman saying that morning that Sarah had been to bed with another man a year ago. He had confronted Sarah, telling her that if she did not confess the name of her lover, he would give her a devilish good beating. Spencer asked if Sarah had put up any resistance and was told ‘none whatsoever’.
Baker willingly produced the very stout stick with which he had hit his wife. He told Spencer that, having started to give Sarah a sound thrashing, he had stopped laying into her for long enough to take her up the back garden to the privy. He had left her there for some time then, when she hadn’t come back into the house for him to continue beating her, had gone out to fetch her, finding her partly conscious and incapable of walking. He had dragged her back to the house and put her in the chair, where she had died minutes later, at which he had immediately gone to the Tuck’s home for assistance.
The police were summoned and the Lacock officer, PC John Brakeworth, quickly arrived to take Baker into custody. As Brakeworth escorted his prisoner to the police station, Baker told him that, had Sarah not died, he would most probably still be beating her now. He was later to say that it was ‘a damned bad job’ and that he wished he hadn’t done it.
Lacock, 2008. (© N. Sly)
Committed on a coroner’s warrant, Nicholas Baker was tried at Devizes on 23 July 1828, his trial immediately following that of Robert Brown, whose story is related in Chapter 4 of this book.
The court heard from Sarah and Thomas Tuck, James Buscombe, Edward Spencer and PC Brakeworth. Baker was not defended, although before the jury retired to consider their verdict, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Park, did give him the opportunity to speak in his own defence. Baker simply muttered something inaudible.
The jury returned almost immediately to pronounce Nicholas Baker guilty of the wilful murder of his wife, Sarah Baker, leaving Mr Justice Park to put on his black cap and decree that Baker should be executed, his body then delivered to the surgeons for dissection. Baker was executed at Fisherton Anger Gaol on 25 July 1828.
It is sadly not unusual for husbands to murder their wives in a fit of jealousy over another man. What makes this particular case different is that, at the time of the murder, Nicholas Baker was seventy-one years old and his wife, Sarah, was sixty-four.