Three pence and a farthing: such was the sum taken from Dormer, an impoverished old man encountered upon the highway in the company of his wife. William Pincher had thrown him down; Edmund Neal rolled him in the dirt and rifled his pockets. The two men had been drinking, and thereupon resolved to fall upon whatever travellers they deemed more fortunate than themselves. The matter might appear negligible by the measure of its plunder, yet it weighed heavily in the courtroom, where the brutality inflicted upon an aged victim caused Neal and Pincher alone to be marked out for death.
Edmund Neal was the son of a Warwickshire blacksmith bearing the same Christian name. His father had acquired considerable prosperity by tending the horses of the neighbouring gentry, frequently visiting those great houses where his craft was sought. He often took his son with him, yet, according to the chronicler, paid scant heed to his schooling; young Neal could scarcely read a chapter. The scenes of luxury he witnessed in those gentlemanly seats bred within him that taste for idleness and pleasure which the early chronicler identifies as the very spring of his undoing.
His family placed him as an apprentice to a tailor. The trade was entirely to his distaste. Those who worked at his side, whom he had hitherto looked down upon, mocked him in turn for his clumsiness. He remained about four years with his first master, chiefly because a journeyman in the shop regaled him with tales of London life. This man had lived with a woman who duped other suitors to maintain him, only to rob him while he slept and run off with a fresh paramour, leaving him burdened with debt and forced to flee. Neal listened intently to these accounts and conceived a longing to imitate such a career.
Upon the death of his first master, he was turned over to a second, a man of looser discipline. Neal deceived him, purloined both cash and goods, and admitted nocturnal visitors who crept away at dawn before the master awoke. Such practices brought about the employer's ruin. Neal presently found himself without bread, without friends, and possessed of no serviceable trade, with barely two shillings in his pocket. He quitted the town on foot along the London road. A woman he fell in with proposed to accompany him; he consented, flattering himself that money in the capital would be plentiful enough to preserve him from want.
The metropolis afforded him a far colder welcome. Country acquaintances upon whom he called turned him out of doors after a day or two. Certain women who took him into their company kept him in a course of debauchery, from which he emerged sickly and exhausted. He then turned to more regular labour, carrying beer for two successive brewers. Yet he soon grew weary of tasks demanding uninterrupted attendance and sought a post in a place of public diversion. After considerable difficulty, he secured employment at Sadler’s Wells. The music and dancing delighted him; he was wont to say that he seemed transported into another world whenever men and women gathered in a barn to the sound of a fiddle.
This satisfaction proved short-lived. Seeking a more dependable livelihood, Neal engaged himself to a hog-butcher, serving him honestly and with great diligence. His master failed in business shortly after his arrival, and Neal protested that his own conduct had been entirely blameless. He was thus cast about for a living. The chronicle places these occurrences at the time of the late rebellion, when men were being pressed into the King’s sea service. Neal entered aboard the man-of-war Gosport, which sailed for the Western Isles of Scotland. There he endured severe cold and wretched victuals, declaring he never tasted ease again until the vessel put back to the west of England. The rebellion quelled, he gladly accepted his discharge and returned to London.
The reputation for fidelity he had earned with the hog-butcher procured him a new place with another trader in the same line. He was frequently entrusted with twenty or thirty pounds, discharging the trust with credit. It was there he met William Pincher. The two men grew intimate. One evening, after drinking deeply at the Hampshire Hog, they fell to lamenting their condition. As the liquor took hold, they agreed to sally forth into the road and beat whomsoever they encountered, as if to chastise the world for its imagined happiness.
The first souls to cross their path were old Dormer and his wife. The chronicle records that both men grossly abused the woman; Pincher then dashed down her frail and aged husband. Neal rolled the fallen man in the dust and rifled or shook from his pocket all the money he possessed: three pence and a farthing. The insignificance of the booty detracted nothing from the violence of the outrage. The assailants had not set out in quest of any settled spoil; they had resolved to fall upon passers-by simply because they fancied them happier than themselves.
Neal and Pincher were apprehended and brought to trial in the sessions of November 1722, alongside three other prisoners. The court looked with particular severity upon their barbarous treatment of the aged Dormer. When the death warrant was returned, these two companions alone were ordered for execution. The record remains silent as to the ultimate fate of the three other convicts. At the place of execution, Neal acknowledged the justice of his sentence. He nevertheless maintained that he suffered rather on account of his drunken frenzy than from any settled malice to rob or injure Dormer. Such an excuse could neither efface the blows dealt nor the copper wrested from a helpless victim; it was merely Neal’s manner of presenting his guilt.
The chronicle likewise sketches the life of Pincher, his fellow in crime and suffering. Born near Lynn in Norfolk, he had been taken under the roof of a gentleman of fortune who undertook to breed him up after his father had enlisted as a soldier. Diligent at first and high in his patron’s favour, Pincher was subsequently seduced by the company of alehouses. Discharged, albeit with a small sum given to encourage his amendment, he reached London and entered the hog-butchering trade. He acknowledged he might have lived comfortably had he laboured with sobriety; his fondness for the tavern betrayed him into looser courses. It was Pincher who had incited Neal to the drunken enterprise that brought them both before the bar of justice.
While under condemnation, Pincher gave himself over to reading, prayer, and the singing of psalms. The chronicler describes his demeanor as blameless and his repentance as profoundly sincere. Neal, on the contrary, was at first seized with terrible dismay at the prospect of the gallows; his reason, the narrative observes, appeared disordered by excess of terror and sorrow. Yet upon the cart, he regained his composure. At the age of about thirty, he died in company with Pincher on the final day of the year 1722. The chronicler contrasts the dissolute lives of the two men with the decency of their end; the record preserves the miserable spoil, the violence inflicted upon Dormer, and Neal’s persistent plea that the wine alone had guided his hand.