The purse contained no more than nineteen pieces when the traveller found it in John Jennings’s pocket. He had carried twenty on the road to Hull, and every one bore a private mark. That mark, intended to help identify the robber, was destined first to condemn an innocent servant; it would reveal the true culprit only after the man had already hanged.
In 1762, the traveller was riding across the Yorkshire countryside. Night overtook him before he could reach Hull. A second horseman appeared upon the lonely road, his face masked. He presented a pistol and demanded the traveller’s purse. The assault was brief; the highwayman seized the twenty guineas and galloped away down a sunken lane.
The traveller was now only a few miles from the town. Night was falling, and fear quenched any desire to press on. He put up at the Bell Inn, an establishment kept by one James Brunel. In the kitchen, while his supper was being prepared, he recounted his misfortune. He added that he made a practice of marking every gold coin he carried; all twenty stolen guineas therefore bore an identical stamp.
This detail could not yet point to anyone. It merely transformed a sum of money into a recognisable series. The traveller retired to his chamber. Brunel, who had not been present during the tale in the kitchen, shortly came up to see him and enquired at what hour the horseman had stopped him. Upon hearing the answer, the innkeeper voiced a suspicion he had been harbouring against his servant Jennings.
For some time past, he said, the young man had possessed money from an unknown source. His conduct appeared disorderly; he had quarrelled with his master and was due to quit the inn. Earlier that day, Brunel had sent him out to change a guinea. Jennings had returned after the traveller’s arrival—drunk, according to his master—and had handed back a coin that did not seem to be the one he had received. Brunel had attached no importance to the matter at first. He maintained that he had connected these circumstances with the traveller’s tale only after discovering that the returned guinea bore the very mark described.
Brunel had already paid out that guinea to a man who had called to collect a debt. The creditor was gone. The innkeeper could not retrieve the coin without exciting grave suspicion; he therefore resolved to disclose what he knew to the traveller. He presented his revelation as the duty of an honest citizen and his suspicion as a mere warning. The traveller agreed to wait with him until the dead of night, so that they might search the servant’s chamber.
Jennings was sound asleep. They searched his clothing and drew forth a purse containing nineteen guineas. The traveller recognised them: they bore, he declared, the mark he had stamped upon his stolen coins. The young man was shaken awake, dragged from his bed, and accused. At first dazed with sleep, then fully conscious of his peril, he protested that he was utterly innocent. Those present gave no credence to his denials. The missing twentieth piece was accounted for by the coin Brunel claimed to have paid to his creditor.
In the morning, Jennings was brought before a justice of the peace. Both the traveller and Brunel deposed under oath. The prisoner could produce neither witness nor alibi; he could only assert his innocence. The circumstantial links seemed complete: nineteen pieces in his pocket, the twentieth passed by his master to a creditor, the return of a different guinea, and the suspicious expenditures Brunel claimed to have witnessed.
His friends advised him to plead guilty and throw himself upon the mercy of the court. They deemed the evidence so damning that any denial would only seal his fate. Jennings rejected their counsel. He pleaded not guilty and was committed to the assizes.
At the trial, however, the evidence exhibited a weakness the prosecution could not entirely conceal. The traveller had been attacked at nightfall at gunpoint; the robber had worn a mask. He could not swear that Jennings was the highwayman who had robbed him. He merely stated that the prisoner’s stature and build might resemble those of the assailant. He recognised his purse and affirmed, to the best of his belief, that the marked coins found upon the accused were his own.
Brunel supplied the remainder of the chain. He had sent Jennings to change a guinea; his servant had returned a different one. Brunel had then paid this second coin to a creditor who had called at the inn, and the piece was produced in court. The creditor confirmed having received it that very night. The traveller compared it with the other nineteen and declared it belonged, in his judgment, to the same series. Each witness corroborated a fragment; together, these fragments appeared to admit of only one conclusion.
The judge summed up the depositions for the jury. The purse had been found in Jennings’s possession, the marked coins were identified, and one of them had passed from Brunel’s hands to his creditor. The jury required little time for deliberation. They returned a verdict of guilty.
The servant maintained his protestations of innocence in prison and upon the scaffold at Hull, crying out with his last breath that he died blameless. The retrospective account that records the case provides neither the traveller’s name nor any independent record allowing the modern reader to reconstruct the proceedings in full. It preserves, however, the crucial detail that exposes the miscarriage: the man who had forged the link between the purse and Jennings was the very man who knew precisely how the marked coin had entered the house.
A year later, another traveller was robbed within Brunel’s own inn. The investigation revealed that the master himself was the thief. Sentenced to death, he repented as his execution drew near and confessed to a string of highway robberies. He admitted to having stopped the traveller near Hull, subsequently riding back to the Bell Inn by a shortcut swifter than his victim’s route. The creditor was already waiting for his money; Brunel drew a guinea from the stolen purse and handed it to him.
When he later learned that the coins were marked and that the traveller had related the robbery, Brunel perceived his peril. He could not recover the guinea without betraying himself. Thus, according to this late confession recorded in the Pitaval, he resolved to shift the blame onto Jennings. The account does not substantiate that Jennings ever changed or touched any of the stolen coins: the only guinea whose movement is traced in the belated confession was taken directly from the purse by Brunel and handed to the creditor. The earlier accusation against the servant was merely the stratagem by which Brunel averted suspicion from himself.
The purse had spoken before the court. It had testified that the coins belonged to the traveller and had been found on Jennings. It could not say who had taken them upon the road, nor what the servant knew. By the time Brunel spoke the truth, justice had already run its fatal course. The nineteen guineas had brought Jennings to the gallows after Brunel deliberately cast guilt upon him. Brunel was unmasked roughly a year later, following another robbery under his own roof, and condemned to death. The historical account does not connect the guinea paid to the creditor with his second arrest; rather, it gives to this late confession its terrible resonance, without undoing what had been irrevocably sealed at the first trial.
Archival Note: The chapter in the Pitaval, published in 1861, retrospectively recounts the trial, the execution of Jennings, and the subsequent confession of Brunel. It reproduces neither official court minutes nor contemporary archival documents. The traveller is not named, and the text supplies no precise dates for the two executions; Brunel’s confession is thus known solely through this narrative tradition.