Francis Watt opens this second series with a frank admission: 'There is a great deal of hanging in this book; that is only because those were hanging times.' The essays, originally published in The New Review, The Yellow Book, and The Ludgate, treat legal antiquities as both historical record and literary material. Watt's prefatory note insists the volume is 'entirely distinct' from the first series, with subjects 'of more general interest' and treated 'with greater fulness of detail.' The catalog subject 'Law -- Great Britain' only partially captures the content; the excerpts reveal a work more concerned with the dramatic, often grisly, human stories behind obsolete statutes than with legal doctrine itself.

Tyburn's Imprecise Geography and Ritual

The opening essay on Tyburn Tree immediately confronts a problem: 'To-day you cannot fix the exact spot where' the gallows stood. Watt's interest lies not in legal precision but in the ceremonial procession from Newgate to the execution site. He details Robert Dowe's bequest for the bell of St. Sepulchre's, the 'St. Giles's Bowl' of ale offered to condemned prisoners, and the executioner's perquisites. The essay catalogues a 'roll of fame' including Catholic martyrs, Cromwell's head, highwaymen, Lord Ferrers, Dr. Dodd, and James Hackman. Watt treats these figures as characters in a national drama, blending legal history with what he calls 'Tyburn in English Letters.'

Witchcraft Trials and Legal Credulity

The section on 'State Trials for Witchcraft' examines how English courts handled accusations of sorcery. Watt does not argue for the reality of witchcraft but instead documents the legal machinery that prosecuted it. He notes the reliance on spectral evidence and confessions extracted under pressure. The essay draws on trial records to show how judges and juries navigated between statutory law and popular belief. Watt's treatment is clinical, focusing on procedure rather than supernatural claims. He observes that the law's 'lumber room' contains these proceedings as relics of a credulous age, where the bench sometimes showed more skepticism than the mob.

A Pair of Parricides: Evidence and Narrative

In 'A Pair of Parricides,' Watt reconstructs the case of Mary Blandy, tried in 1752 for poisoning her father. He draws heavily on contemporary accounts, quoting the prosecution's description of Cranstoun: 'His shape no ways genteel, his legs clumsy.' The narrative includes details such as the hired band playing under windows, the arsenic disguised as Scotch pebbles, and the maid Susannah Gunnell preserving a powder from a dish. Watt notes the father's dying words of pardon, and Blandy's flight 'with nothing on but a half-sack and petticoat without a hoop.' The essay demonstrates how legal evidence—letters, servant testimony, the rescued poison—coalesces into a story with literary shape, complete with dramatic irony and pathos.

Watt's method throughout is to let the documents speak, but he arranges them with a novelist's sense of pacing. Readers should attend to the footnotes and marginalia: the author's own voice emerges in asides about the 'picturesque' quality of old punishments and the lost excitement of former ages. The book rewards those who read it as a collection of curiosities rather than a systematic legal history.