NP The Complete Newgate Calendar

[Otto]

The Complete Newgate Calendar, Vol. I

THOMAS DUN
Head of a Gang of Outlaws, on Account of whom King Henry I. is credibly
supposed to have built Dunstable. Executed Piecemeal

"THIS person was of very mean extraction, and born in a little vilIage
between Kempston and Elstow, in Bedfordshire. It is said he had contracted
thieving so much from his childhood, that everything he touched stuck to his
fingers like birdlime, and that, the better to carry on his villainies, he
changed himself into as many shapes as Proteus, being a man that understood
the world so well--I mean the tricks and fallacies of it  that there was
nothing which he could not humour, nor any part of villainy that came amiss
to him. To day he was a merchant, on the morrow a soldier, the next day a
gentleman, and the day following a beggar. In short, he was every day what
he pleased himself.
 (...)
Accordingly, to convince the spectators round him that his usual intrepidity
and greatness of mind had not left him, he grasped both the executioners,
and struggled so long with them that he was seen nine times successively
upon the scaffoId, and the men upon him. However, he had still strength to
rise up from them, and taking his solemn walks from one end of the stage to
the other, all which time he cursed the day of his birth, vented a thousand
imprecations on those who had been the cause of his being apprehended, but
chiefly on him who had been the first to beset him. But his cruel destiny is
determined not to leave him; he finds his strength diminish, and that he
cannot, in spite of himself, defend himself any longer. He yields, and the
executioners chop off his hands at the wrists, then cut off his arms at the
elbows, and all above next, within an inch or two of his shouIders; next his
feet were cut off beneath the ankles, his legs chopped off at the knees, and
his thighs cut off about five inches from his trunk, which, after severing
his head from it, was burnt to ashes. So after a Iong struggle with death,
as dying by piecemeal, he put a period to his wicked and abominable life;
and the several members cut off from his body, being twelve in all, besides
his head, were fixed up in the principal places in Bedfordshire, to be a
terror to such villains as survived him."

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