John Breads's Gibbet Cage

DIFFERENT CATEGORY - not a stone at all, but the actual surviving gibbet cage and skull of the killer himself, publicly labelled and preserved as a relic; found while chasing a Historic England reference to the killer's former inn during a search for the word 'murdered'. In the early hours of 17 March 1743, John Breads, a Rye butcher who owned the Flushing Inn, lay in wait in the churchyard of St Mary's, Rye, intending to kill the town's mayor, James Lamb, after some falling-out between them. In the dark he mistook Lamb's brother-in-law and deputy, 50-year-old Alan Grebell, for Lamb and stabbed him twice in the chest; Grebell, apparently not immediately realising he'd been fatally wounded, walked home and died in a chair by his fire. In a detail almost too neat to be true, Breads was tried with James Lamb - the man he'd actually meant to kill - sitting as judge. He was convicted, hanged on 8 June 1743, and gibbeted at what became known as Gibbet Marsh, where his body hung on display for over 20 years. His skull, still inside the iron gibbet cage, survives today, held (not currently on public display) in the attic of Rye Town Hall, with a replica cage viewable at Rye Castle museum. A colourful detail often repeated - that Breads was seen drunk in the street shouting 'butchers should kill lambs!' - was argued by historian Paul Monod (2003) to be a likely later embellishment rather than a contemporary account.