On the edge of Wimbledon Common where the Kingston Road passes, are some trees on the side of a small rise of ground. This part of the common is called Jerry’s Hill. It is named after the 18th-century highwayman called Jerry Abershawe, who frequented those parts and held up carriages on their way between Kingston and London. He was one of the last highwaymen.
They chose lonely remote places just outside towns and cities where there was a constant flow of people travelling. Wimbledon, then a small rural village on the outskirts of London and with a vast area of wild untamed common land around it, was an ideal spot for a highwayman to frequent and perform his dastardly deeds. Passing members of the aristocracy and stagecoaches would most certainly have been prime targets.
By the early 1800s, highwaymen were all but extinct. The toll roads had made highway robbery very difficult. Roads were manned every few miles and the people on them had paid to use them. This made it very difficult for highway robbers to make their escape along these routes so this crime virtually died out.
Louis Jeremiah Abershawe (1773 – 3 August 1795), better known as Jerry Abershawe, terrorised travellers between London and Portsmouth in the later 18th century. He was born in Kingston upon Thames and at the age of 17 began his life of crime. He formed a gang, which was based at an inn on the London Road between Kingston and Wimbledon, at the bottom of Kingston Hill called the Bald Faced Stag.
As well as his primary occupation of highway robbery, it was highly likely that Jerry Abershawe also managed to gain the odd carcase of a King’s deer from Richmond Park, which backed on to the Bald Face Stag Inn. The inn no longer exists, but there was a very large and comfortable pub and restaurant built there in the early 1900’s that, just a few years ago, was demolished for new housing built on the site.
Jerry had other places of refuge at Clerkenwell near Saffron Hill. He used a house called the Old House in West Street. Other highwaymen also used this house. Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild were known to have stayed there. It was a house renowned for its dark closets, trap doors, and sliding panels.
All attempts to bring Jerry Abershawe to justice failed until in January 1795, when he shot dead one of the constables sent to arrest him in Southwark and badly injured the other constable sent along too. Abershawe was arrested at a pub in Southwark called The Three Brewers.
He was young, just 24 years of age when he was brought to trial at Surrey Assizes in July of 1795, and convicted and sentenced to death. He travelled to his agonising death in the cart with two condemned murderers, one male and one female.
On Monday 3 August 1795, Jerry Abershawe was hung on Kennington Common, a couple of miles from Wimbledon and his body was then taken to be hanged in chains at Putney Bottom near the scene of many of his crimes. Only men’s bodies were subjected to this postmortem punishment, which was meant as a stark reminder for others to see and be warned about the price to pay for evil ways. His body was pecked clean by the crows and his bones were taken as souvenirs – some bones were prised out of his fingers and toes, apparently to use as pipe stoppers. Buttons were also snipped off the his coat as mementos. Relics from the bodies of executed criminals were believed to hold special powers, even to have beneficial medicinal effects.
Jerry Abershawe was the last person to have his body displayed like this on a gibbet. Dismemberment and mouldering away was not quite the end for Abershaw, who lived on for half a century or so in popular culture.
Source : adapted from an article in Jane Austen’s World et al.
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