Combe Gibbet - myth and background

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This article was written by Dr Donald Peck and presented to the Virtual Museum February 2022.

Combe gibbet - myth and background

In August 1879 the Newbury and District Field Club conducted what sounds like a leisurely tour of the villages along the scarp of the downs and took in the parish of Combe near the end.

Richard Kimber of Eastwick (born in 1809) was their guide. He was the owner of the remains of the (in)famous, ancestral, then supposedly 200-year old leg of pork which dated, he said, from the same day as the hangings. The pork was put in a glass case in 1863 and documented in 1870 and moved to the Newbury Museum – where it must still be (though not, of course, on display!). Richard Kimber said that he had last tasted it in 1825 when his family gave some to two people for Christmas lunch, garnished with white currants from the garden.

Richard Kimber on the same occasion boasted over 200 fox brushes, including, on one famous day, the hunting of 3 foxes (being awarded the brushes of 2 of them), followed by a ride to Andover for a late market the same evening.

In reporting on this visit, the District Field Club claimed to have found an unspecified source which told this story: George Brooman (or Broomeham) of Inkpen and Dorothy Newman of Combe were hung and gibbeted late in the reign of Charles II after being convicted of murder at Winchester Assizes (which links the murder with Combe, then in Hampshire, rather than Inkpen in Berkshire). George Brooman and Dorothy Newman killed Martha Brooman (presumably his wife) and her son Robert ‘each with a staffe’ and they were ‘ordered to be hanged in cheynes neere the place of the murder’, the place not being named. But subsequent searches made in the National Archives and the Hampshire County Archives (for the Winchester Assizes), including searches of the relevant assize records, have failed to find any reference to any such murder, hanging or gibbeting, so the story may well have been more myth than OGS Crawford, an eminent, though rather eccentric, archaeologist most famous for his aerial surveys of Salisbury Plain in the 1920s, led another visit of the Newbury Field Club to Combe and Netherton in 1964. Commander Britton Roberts then produced ‘two teeth and jaw chippings found by his wife 30 yards from the gibbet’.

The furthest back that in 1964 the Field Club could trace the gibbet story was this: they learnt that George Cummings, who had died 1901 at 91 had told how, as a boy of nine in 1819/20, led one of the horses bringing a tree from Combe wood, to build a new gibbet: 25 ft high with 6 ft of it below ground.
They also found tales of the history of the gibbet: a dispute was said to have arisen at time of the construction of the gibbet because the participants came from both Combe and Inkpen and the cottage where the murder took place was said to have been high on the downs and in Combe, whereas a nearby pond which the bodies were thrown into was in Inkpen. The house they lived in was said to be in Combe, so the parish of Combe undertook the cost, drew a fresh boundary and added 2.5 acres to the parish including the pond. The land was held as common land for many more years before it was enclosed some years. This could possibly be Wigmoreash pond, the pond 0.4 mile west of the Gibbet, on top of the downs just north of the track along the downs, just where a path leads down to Combe via Wrights Farm (past what would then have been known as Buttermere Corner).

However today, after several searches, we have been able to find no trace of the trial or other proceedings in the Hampshire county records.

What does interest us is the dispute between the parishes of Combe and Inkpen (which incidentally were never in the same county or diocese until 1895). Parish boundaries were important: they were key elements of land grants recorded in Anglo-Saxon charters and were often maintained by annual beating of the bounds of the parish carried out by parishioners physically walking round the parish.

Parish boundaries were more important if, like here, they were county boundaries, even more so if they were on the top of an escarpment and highly visible. In addition to the tumulus on which the gibbet was erected, there are many other prominent tumuli or beorgs (distinct from burhs = castle/hillfort) nearby from the Iron Age or earlier, for example along the escarpment top path to the west of the Gibbet, towards Oswald’s Burh, as identified in Saxon charters of the 8th-9th centuries BCE. This burh fortification is the prominent beech copse 2 miles further west which has several tombs on it and near it, and it featured on the parish boundaries of Ham and Buttermere/’Ashmere’.

The tumuli here were all erected to be seen from afar. The Combe Gibbet tumulus also probably became an assembly place for similar reasons, as assembly places are common on the boundaries between parishes, and would be used to sort out disputes between parishes over land boundaries (which might be the background to the story of Wigmoreash) and stray animals or disputed grazing (though grazing could also be shared between neighbouring parishes in the post-Saxon farming system of manors like Combe and forest villages like Inkpen).

There is some evidence that hangings took place in prominent places such as these, but much more evidence that gibbets were invariably in prominent locations (eg Cromwell’s remains being exposed outside parliament after the Restoration), as the whole point of gibbets was to discourage such crimes by other people. Judges could choose whether a convict due to be hanged should be given to anatomists for scientific purposes or gibbeted, which required an iron cage to be made to hold the body in place for the longest possible time. Gibbeting went on in England until around 1800, so it is likely that the Combe gibbet was erected and possibly used at some point, but it is not clear when that was, or if towards the end of the period such a gibbet would have been used for purely symbolic purposes. If so the lasting memory of the gibbet is, at Combe, an effective result!

[DP 05/21]

More on Donald and Lucy Peck's quest for primary evidence supporting the story behind Combe Gibbet:

Here goes with my explanation of why Lucy and I have both decided we think the lurid tale of adultery associated with Combe gibbet is a myth.

The fact that there are quite a few different versions of the adultery story does not, on balance, we feel, either strengthen or weaken the case for its veracity. So we decided to 'interrogate the sources', as they say.

First of all we were puzzled about the surnames of the people whose bodies were supposedly exposed on the gibbet, Brooman (or Broomham) and Newman, as neither of them appeared anywhere in the parish registers of Combe and Faccombe (not so sure about Inkpen registers, but we have never come across either of these names anywhere in our researches on Inkpen either).

We tried to find relevantly-dated assize records (ie 1660-1700) in the Hampshire Record Office but there were none that were in any way useable.

Then we were given the attached 1950 brochure details lent to us by Mr Ray Bulpitt of Andover. These seemed to point authoritatively to a named Assize document in the PRO which also turned up in the current National Archives index (which is in itself somewhat miraculous). But Lucy and I have both separately gone through ASSI 23 for the period with no success. It is a terrible volume, organized by date but not by anything else and almost completely illegible (except for one unusually very long entry about a licence for an alehouse which is legible and sensible). Overall a few stray names are visible (but very few women's Christian names) but no details at all of crimes or executions. We also began to doubt whether the Gaol report is even the right place to look because gaol deliveries (dealing with the people held in gaols locally) were the routine work of assizes, rather than the trials. But the only other series of assize reports in the National Archives (or anywhere else, I think) that is trackable at all for this period is actually something called the Postea books, within ASSI 24, which do not sound very coherent or well-organised either, but may conceivably be worth a look at some point.

After reading the Assize records for that period which were transcribed and published by JS Cockburn for other counties (esp Kent), we find they are well organised and full of pretty lenient sentences, and no stories that are lurid like the Combe myth. The most common crimes which assize judges thought deserved execution were clearly infanticide and (surprisingly) horse stealing.

We also thought about the reason why there would have been a gibbet on Inkpen Beacon irrespective of the myth. We think there is every reason that there could have been one for these reasons:

Prominent location on a parish boundary;
An appropriately sited barrow reminding people of earlier inter-parish assemblies and incidences of dispute resolution at the gibbet site.

As for the history of gibbets, the heyday for use of and preoccupation about gibbets seems to have been the 18th c - and there are no stories of gibbets, murders or adulteries in Combe or Inkpen then.

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