Murder on Bubb Down Hill
Roger Guttridge tells the story behind Murderers’ Lane and its sequels
Published in February ’20
AT MELBURY BUBB is a road that goes by the distinctive name of Murderers’ Lane – and a broken gravestone in the parish churchyard offers a clue to the story behind it. The inscription records the death of yeoman farmer Thomas Baker, who was ‘barbarously murdered on Bubbdowne Hill November 10, 1694’.
The story goes that Farmer Baker was driving his horse and cart home from Dorchester Market after selling corn and cattle. Slung over his saddlebags were the proceeds of his business – two bags of gold guineas.
Unfortunately word of his poorly defended riches reached the ears of two ne’er-do-wells. They lay in wait on Bubb Down Hill, and as Farmer Baker approached, one of them threw a stone. It hit the farmer on the head and he fell to the ground.
His startled horse made its own way back to the farm, arriving with the moneybags intact. Farmer Baker was later found dead where he fell but the would-be robbers had long gone.
Seven years passed before further information came to light – and it only did so then thanks to the astuteness of the landlord of the pub at nearby Evershot.
He was busy serving his home-brewed ale when he overheard two customers quarrelling over money – and discussing the killing of Farmer Baker. The inebriated customers were arrested and held in the village lock-up before being moved to Dorchester Jail the following day.
At the next Dorset Assizes, the pair were convicted and sentenced to be ‘taken to the tree by which you did commit wilful murder, there to be gibbeted in chains to suffer death. And we charge that none may succour you in your need and distress. And may the Lord have mercy on your souls.’
An Evershot blacksmith was commissioned to make the cage, which was fixed to a tree near the scene of the crime with the two men secured by chains.
The murderers were still alive when an old countrywoman named Martha Spigot passed the gibbet. Hearing their desperate pleas for water, and perhaps unaware of the order that they must receive no succour, she took pity and thrust a tallow candle from her basket into each of the men’s mouths. This landed poor Martha with seven years in the very jail where the two men had been held before their trial.
The killers soon succumbed to the inevitable but more than 300 years later there are still various reminders of their deed. The scene of the crime is known as Gibbet Pit while the route followed by Farmer Baker’s unmanned horse and cart is known as Murderers’ Lane. The King’s Arms at Evershot became the Acorn Inn and achieved a little fame of its own as the Sow and Acorn in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
On a foggy night in 1865, a seven-year-old girl and her parents were walking in Murderers’ Lane when they heard the faint sounds of something approaching. ‘We heard the breathing of a horse, and then we saw it coming round the bend, pulling a cart,’ the girl recalled 83 years later. ‘The lantern lights were dim at first but presently we heard creaking wheels, the lights were brighter and the horse’s breathing heavier. It was all so real and natural.’
The girl’s father ordered his wife and daughter to ‘stand aside in the ditch and let Thomas Baker’s horse and cart go past’, adding that he had seen them before. The father stood on one side of the lane, mother and daughter on the other. ‘As the horse and cart came past, I shut my eyes,’ the 90-year-old told G.W. Greening, author of an article published in The Dorset Year Book of 1949-50. ‘I felt so frightened, but I felt it pass; when I looked again ’twas gone. All around was the pitch-black night. But it’s all so plain to me now at 90 as when I was a little maid of seven.’
In the Melbury Bubb burial register for 1694, Farmer Baker is recorded as ‘Thomas Williams alias Baker’. He was born about 1620, possibly at Toller Porcorum, where his parents Thomas Baker and Katherine Williams married in 1616.
Their descendant Stephen Robert Kuta, of Essex, who has comprehensively researched the family tree, tells me that all three of Thomas and Katherine’s children used Williams as an alias surname. ‘It was a union of two surnames, both of which appear in heraldic records,’ says Stephen.
Farmer Baker, the murder victim, married Dorothy Hanna or Hannan at Cattistock in 1636. Both were very young, which was not unknown in those days. Dorothy died aged 59 at Melbury Bubb ten years before her husband’s tragic death.
The couple had three children – Robert, Elizabeth and Walter. Curiously, Stephen is related to all three.
Robert is his ten-times-great-grandfather via his son Robert; Elizabeth married James Mintern, Stephen’s second cousin eleven times removed; and Walter is his nine-times-great-grandfather via his son John. Farmer Baker is therefore Stephen’s tenth and eleventh great-grandfather.
He is also related to the legendary Conjuring Minterne of Batcombe – but that’s another story.
