“I have killed a man.” Shortly after midnight, the farmer Thomas Patteson sought out a constable in Tring, insisting upon conducting him to the body. The officer initially took his words for the ravings of drink. During the night of 20 to 21 October 1839, Patteson had departed the Boot, an inn at Buckland, in the company of his friend John Charles. By morning, Charles lay dead in a grassy lane between the road and a stile leading across the fields; Patteson was in gaol. At his trial, the question would not merely be who had struck the blows, but what Patteson had believed he saw in the darkness.
Charles had entered the Boot at about ten o’clock in the morning and had been drinking ale. Patteson joined him toward noon for dinner. The two men remained together, drinking and conversing, until the landlord, John Edwards, arrived at about five in the afternoon, whereupon they continued drinking in his company. The record contains no mention of any quarrel between the two farmers. Pelham insists, on the contrary, upon their longstanding friendship and their similar station in life, circumstances that lend the death of Charles its profoundly disconcerting character.
At about half-past ten that evening, they prepared to set out for home. Their routes lay together for a considerable part of the journey. Before stepping out into the night, Charles asserted that he was the soberer of the two and proposed to “walk the chalk.” In that district, the chronicler explains, sobriety was tested by requiring a man to follow a straight line chalked upon the floor, or a seam between rows of bricks. The trial favoured Charles; he appeared less impaired by liquor. In accordance with the custom described by Pelham, he undertook to see Patteson safely home.
Neither reached his destination. At about half-past midnight, Patteson appeared in the market town of Tring, still intoxicated and in an evident state of agitation. He found Johnson, a police constable, and repeated that he had killed a man. The officer at first dismissed the declaration as an idle boast or an incoherent rambling. Patteson insisted and offered to point out the spot. In a lane leading toward the dwellings of the two farmers, they discovered Charles’s body upon the grass, close to a gap connecting the road with a footpath across the field.
Before the discovery, Patteson had given Johnson a different identity for his victim: he claimed to have struck down Joe Kibble, a chimney sweep from Tring, whom Humphrey Bull, a relieving officer, had allegedly sent to murder him. Patteson and Charles both served as guardians of the poor for the local union. Bull, the relieving officer, belonged to a different political party from Patteson, who was a Liberal; Pelham notes, however, that they were on friendly terms. When the bank notes found in the dead man’s pockets were produced, Patteson described them as the very notes Bull had given Kibble to pay for his assassination. The constables present were still unaware that the corpse was that of Charles; indeed, they dispatched a messenger to Charles’s house, requesting that he come to identify it.
The injuries rendered it impossible to treat the matter as a mere fall. The face and head were dreadfully battered, the nose was fractured, and the surgeon deposed to a concussion of the brain produced by violence. The ten-pound and five-pound notes, together with some gold coins, remained untouched in the pockets. The knobby stick Charles had carried upon leaving the inn was found beneath his body, but it bore no marks of blood and did not appear to have been used in the assault. The surgeon was of the opinion that the wounds had been inflicted with the fists.
The deceased was identified as Charles, the companion who had quitted the inn with Patteson. Pelham describes the farmer as being instantly plunged into overwhelming grief, a condition in which he remained until his trial.
To explain how two companions could have become so estranged that one beat the other to death, Pelham offers a reconstruction. Charles, whom witnesses described as fond of a jest when in his cups, may have intended to play a prank upon his friend. He was well aware of the dread Patteson felt when travelling that lonely road. The footpath ran parallel to the highway behind a hedge and a bank; near the gap, a mound afforded a hiding place from which one might suddenly spring out. Charles, it was supposed, had left the road, waited under cover, and then leaped out upon Patteson.
No eye witnessed this encounter. Pelham presents it as a plausible conjecture, deduced from the position of the body and the configuration of the ground. He expressly leaves open the question of whether Charles had laid hands upon his companion before the latter could recognize him. Patteson’s terror, heightened by intoxication, would have transformed a jest into a deadly assault in his eyes; he would then have struck out with such fury that the very first blow incapacitated Charles from speaking. In Patteson’s own account, the man upon the ground had repeated Bull’s name. The chronicle treats these utterances as a drunken hallucination, rather than evidence of a conspiracy.
The case passed through several jurisdictions. The coroner’s jury had returned a verdict of manslaughter; the prosecution subsequently presented an indictment for murder to the grand jury, which threw it out. Patteson’s trial opened at Aylesbury on Tuesday, 10 March 1840, before Mr Baron Parke. The indictment charged him with the death of Charles, alleged to have occurred at Buckland on 21 October; the narrative dates the beginning of the evening to the 20th, which accords with the night between the 20th and 21st.
The defence produced witnesses who testified that Patteson was a respectable man of a mild and amiable disposition. In summing up, the learned judge explained to the jury the distinction between excusable homicide and manslaughter: they were to determine whether an alarm of personal danger, occasioned by the prisoner’s mistake, would have operated in the same manner upon a reasonable and sober man. If such apprehension would not have overpowered a man of ordinary reason, Patteson must be found guilty; if it would, the act might be excused. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter, recommending him to mercy.
The judge passed a sentence of two months’ imprisonment, taking into account the five months Patteson had already spent in gaol since the fatal night. His Lordship declared his belief that the deed had proceeded from an illusion born of a mind unseated by drink, and emphasized the total absence of any intention to kill a friend with whom no quarrel had ever been shown. Yet he declined to remit punishment altogether: the hours spent at the Boot, followed by the dark lane, demonstrated the perilous nature of drunkenness when fear and a misconstruction of another’s actions are joined to it. In this cause, the verdict did not transform Charles’s supposed jest into an established fact; it adjudicated the blows Patteson confessed to having struck, and the measure of guilt the jury found therein.