On the Tuesday evening, lights were seen to ascend above the churchyard of Hemington. John Clarke, a butcher returning to the village, saw three of them burst like rockets in the air. Richard Hawkins, servant to the rector, perceived another flickering near a grave. The contemporary tract places these apparitions at the very threshold of the exhumation, without establishing any material connection between them. According to its preface, that which truly incited the parishioners to break open the coffin was rather an enquiry made by Jane’s mistress: had the sexton dug the pit sufficiently deep, and had the earth been well heaped over it?
The pamphlet sets the affair within a calendar that the modern reader must navigate with caution. The indictment and depositions date the occurrences to 13 February 1739, reckoned according to the old legal year of England, which commenced only on 25 March. The title-page, however, announces the trial of 31 March 1740. It is one and the same prosecution, and not two years that lay between the death and the assizes. Jane served in the house of Elizabeth Branch, a widow, and her daughter Betty, likewise named Elizabeth in the record. The pamphlet styles her an apprentice girl, yet records no mention of her age.
The opening scene turns upon an errand for some bran. Ann James, a fellow servant in the house, had the day before directed Jane to fetch it from Anthony Budd’s at Faulkland. On the following morning, William Budd came to work upon the Branch premises and declared that no one had come for the bran. Ann and Betty questioned Jane; the girl maintained she had indeed performed her errand. Betty flew into a passion. According to Ann’s testimony, she commanded her to gather some supple twigs, and then went herself into the ox-house, whither Jane had gone to feed the calves.
Ann related that upon her return, Jane bore a wound upon her arm and was bleeding. Betty struck her with her fist and pinched her ears, whereupon Elizabeth came down in her turn. Mother and daughter each seized a willow twig. They threw Jane to the floor; Betty pinned her down with her knee while both women whipped her. The girl was then beaten with the heel of a shoe, kicked about the body, and struck upon the head and shoulders with a stick. In Ann’s telling, Jane attempted to flee from the kitchen into the parlour; the two women pursued her, dragging her back with repeated blows.
This deposition does not merely depict a succession of assaults. It portrays, if one gives it credit, the domestic labours exacted in the very wake of the violence: washing away her own blood, cleaning the room, scouring a pot, and sweeping the parlour. Ann stated that Jane held her head, groaned piteously, spoke in a faint voice, and could scarcely stand upright. Asked concerning the pail of bran, she reportedly answered that she knew the way; commanded to wash the dishes, she whispered once more that she would do so. Ann recorded that the girl appeared utterly disabled, yet the orders never ceased.
Towards six o’clock, Ann found her lying stretched out by the fire, her bloodied cap having been exchanged for a clean one. She said she warned her mistress that Jane was dead. Elizabeth replied that she had administered a cordial to her, and bade them carry the girl upstairs. Ann went to fetch wine; upon her return, about eight o’clock, she found her cold. That same Wednesday night, near eleven o’clock, Elizabeth compelled Ann to lie down, fully dressed, beside the corpse until morning. On Thursday the 14th, Ann and William Budd took the measurements for the coffin without stripping Jane; they saw only an arm and a leg, blackened with bruises. On Friday the 15th, Elizabeth instructed Ann to wash the body without removing the shift, so as to conceal, as she said, the multitude of marks.
The burial did not quiet the whispers of the parish. Francis Coombes, the parish clerk and sexton, testified that he was requested to toll the bell on Friday, whereas Jane had died on the Wednesday; in his parish, he observed, the knell was rung on the day itself or early the following morning. After the interment, Elizabeth enquired of him how deep the grave was made, and whether the earth was firmly trodden down. This circumstance, recounted at the bar, assumed a singular weight when the villagers gathered in the churchyard to view the coffin. The lights witnessed by Clarke and Hawkins were another strand in the local rumour. The witnesses described them as rockets or the flame of a candle; yet no material link between these phenomena and the maiden’s death is established by the tract.
Robert Carver and John Marchant related that they obtained the church key under the pretext of ringing a peal, and thereupon dug up the coffin. They summoned several women of the parish to view the body before resolving whether it should be reinterred. Mary Vigor and Betty Marchant declared they saw numerous bruises and wounds. Mr. Salmon, the surgeon, described a heavy contusion upon the forehead, fractures of the skull, diverse lacerations, an extensive bruise about the region of the loins, as well as lacerated fingers and large contused areas upon the back, arms, thighs, and legs. He pronounced certain of these lesions mortal, and judged the injuries to have been inflicted while Jane was yet alive. These remain the reported findings of his examination, and not an independent medical review verifiable today.
Arraigned before Mr. Justice Chapple, the prisoners did not deny having chastised Jane. The witness William Palmer stated that they had spoken to him of a fall with a pail, which had purportedly injured her head; they acknowledged the blows, but attributed the fatal hurt to an accident which they could support by no living witness. Elizabeth had likewise suggested that the neighbours had inflicted further wounds upon the corpse after opening the grave. Palmer replied that a surgeon could readily distinguish wounds made before death from those done after; the mother thereupon gave him a guinea and dismissed him without his inspecting the body.
Ann James was cross-examined in her turn regarding her own conduct. She denied having concealed that the Branches beat Jane, swearing she had interposed herself at the cost of being reviled. Yet the coroner, George Hayme, deposed that at her first examination on the Friday, she had professed not to know who had killed Jane or in what manner she came by her death. The pamphlet records this testimony against her, but subsequently subjoins, in informations sworn later by members of the inquest jury, that Ann had never denied knowing how Jane was beaten and slain. These two contradictory versions stand printed in the very same pamphlet; the historical record affords no means of deciding between them.
The defence endeavoured to divert suspicion upon Ann herself. John Lawrence averred that she had beaten Jane, and that the girl had complained of her harsh usage. Thomas Wrentmore swore he had seen Ann pull Jane by the hair and strike her several weeks prior. Anne Paradise likewise reported complaints made by Jane against the servant. William Budd, in a separate affidavit annexed to the tract, testified he had seen Betty beat Jane with a stick some eight weeks before her death, and Ann strike her once with a broom. The defence set forth these testimonies; they pleaded moreover that the prisoners were prosecuted out of malice, and that Betty had taken in and clothed a destitute, friendless girl.
The published record does not resolve these disparate elements into a simple certainty. Ann was the sole eyewitness to the occurrences within the house, yet she was herself a participant in the domestic labour and was fiercely assailed as to her credibility. The medical men described extensive and fatal wounds, yet the pamphlet records no independent counter-examination to weigh each injury. Palmer spoke of a fall, though he had not witnessed it. The parishioners uncovered the body after the burial; the possibility of the coffin having been tampered with was raised by the prisoners, while Mr. Salmon maintained that certain injuries had occurred while the blood was yet in circulation. Every piece of evidence assumed a different colour according to the voice that delivered it.
The trial endured, according to the report, for about six hours. Following the judge’s summing-up, the jury returned their verdict without leaving the court, finding both Elizabeth and Betty Branch guilty of wilful murder. The pamphlet asserts that Elizabeth preserved an unbending countenance, and that she repeatedly kicked Mary Vigor during the delivery of her testimony; this detail remains the uncorroborated narrative of the pamphleteer. On the morrow, the condemned women challenged the composition of the panel, affirming that the former jury would have brought in another verdict. Their exception availed them nothing against the sentence of death. The text records the execution on 3 May, relating that the mother urged her daughter to prepare early to escape the press of the multitude; it records likewise that Betty had fallen into fits upon the passing of the sentence.
Subjoined to the narrative of the execution, a postscript asserts that Jane had indeed gone for the bran, but that Margaret Budd had refused to deliver it without immediate payment. The pamphlet concludes that the young servant thus fell a “victim” to the fury of her mistress. This explanation does not appear as evidence heard at the trial; it is the final gloss of the publisher, whose source the tract does not disclose. A like caution is demanded before its preface, which at once portrays the mother as a barbarous mistress and revives ancient suspicions regarding the death of her husband. Such remarks illuminate the accusatory tenor of the publication, yet they formed no part of the indictment tried in court.
At the close of these pages, the lights above the churchyard remain what they were to Clarke and Hawkins: faint gleams beheld through the darkness, likened to rockets or the flame of a candle. The grave, for its part, was opened by the villagers, and the body gave rise to medical findings, an indictment, and a sentence of death. Between these steps, the text preserves the dispute over Ann’s words, the imputations cast upon her testimony, and the hypothesis of the fall. The pamphlet chronicles a judicial conclusion; it leaves to the reader the duty of distinguishing what the witnesses swore they saw from what the publisher sought to have believed.