Have you ever looked into the dark and felt like something was looking back? Sometimes, that’s because something is.
In 1685 were the Bloody Assizes. The Monmouth rebellion had been quashed, and King James II wanted to make an example. A very emphatic, bloody example — the kind of example that people don’t forget. The assizes were a series of trials held across south-west England, involving some 1400 prisoners. James sent his Lord Chief Justice, one George Jeffries, to lead this carnival of death. Treason, it was known, had the death penalty and Jeffries made very sure to earn the moniker ‘the Hanging Judge’.
He was perhaps not worse than many other judges of the time. Nevertheless, his legacy was and is one of sadism and cruelty. As Britannica puts it, he’d “earned notoriety by savagely ridiculing and bullying the defendants”. He sentenced more than 600 prisoners to death or to slavery abroad. He was also known to extort money from the victims, which is one reason why his appointment as Lord Chancellor in September of the same year probably felt a lot like rubbing salt into the wound. It’s easy to imagine how that must have felt, the hopelessness, the fear, and — above all — the anger.
You see, it’s at this point that this particular story takes a turn for the weird.
A curse is a complicated thing; whether you believe in the supernatural or not, what actually happens remains the same. Maybe it was one of the mothers of the condemned, or a wife, a daughter, a son. His victims were so utterly below him in the power strata. They couldn’t attack him with fists, or do judgement by the hanging rope. All they had were words, and words are more powerful than they seem. Then again, it could have just been pure coincidence.
Whatever you believe, Jeffries hardly got to savour his new position in the end. Only three years later the Glorious Rebellion had King James fleeing to France, and Jeffries didn’t quite manage to make it out with him. In fact, he got as far as dressing himself as a sailor (and shaving his eyebrows, a crucial step in disguise as everyone knows) before being caught in Wapping. He’d been recognised by former surviving judicial victim — a more perfect case of just desserts you could not find.
In the ultimate twist of irony, he died four years after the Assizes in the Tower of London. He went to that final sleep terrified of the mob that were (no exaggeration) baying for his blood. Three years, it seemed, had not been enough for the Westcountry to forget what he had done.
Over three hundred years later, it has still not been long enough. Jeffries appears in books from Sabatini’s Captain Blood to Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. Needless to say, he’s never the hero. All across Wales and the Westcountry, the Judge lingers on. Lydford Castle claims him as their ‘resident spook’, and he’s been spotted haunting Exeter’s dark alleys. Both have him down as a large, black pig. Dignity in death who?
Slightly more disturbingly, however, are the reports from ghost hunter Iain Alderton. He says that his former co-investigators were so traumatised by an encounter with Jeffries at Wyndam’s oak in Dorset that he now works alone. One of them was apparently so shocked by what she’d seen that she passed out; pictures of the oak came out “covered in scratch marks”. Maybe Jeffries just wants to be free of his personal purgatory. Or perhaps he is still as vindictive in death as he was in life.
