Grisly relics of the dead : where some gruesome memorials are to be found.

Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Grisly relics of the dead : where some gruesome memorials are to be found. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A row of departed friars in the vaults of the Capuchinos Chapel, at Palermo. GRISLY RELICS OE THE BEAD. WHERE SOME GRUESOME MEMORIALS ARE TO BE FOUND. FOR the living grim death and its relics always possess a certain amount of attraction. The catacombs and the Morgue of Paris never lack visitors, and the show places of England which have a skull or a bone to show possess a never-failing attraction. The. Athenaeum Library at Bury St. Edmunds possesses one ghastly volume which is happily unique. It is called The Trial of Cor¬ der,” and is bound in the murderer’s own skin. The book is a memento of a murder dis¬ covered b v the j agency of a dream. About seventy years ago Corder was en¬ gaged to marry Maria Marten, the belle of the sleepy little village of Fal- stead, Suffolk. It is recorded that he found many excuses for deferring his Wedding. , Finally he came to her one day, and took her to a neighbouring town to be married. Her father and stepmother never heard from her directly again, although Corder brought fre¬ quent messages from her for about six months. But, night after night, her stepmother dreamed that Maria had been murdered, and buried in a barn not many miles from her home. The dreams so wrought upon her that she persuaded her husband to search beneath the barn, where, to his horror, his daughter’s muti¬ lated body was found. Circumstantial evi¬ dence was strong enough to convict Corder, who was hanged shortly after¬ wards. A remarkable relic, in the shape of a skull, is that of Roger Downe, which is pre¬ served in a recess on the staircase of Wardley Hall, in Lane ash ire. Roger was the last of the Downes, one of those wild, roystering blades, who flourished in the; rowdy days of Charles II. He came to a disreputable end in a The mummified head of the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, which is kept at the Holy Trinity Church, Minories.