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on to act under every variety of climate, and at every distance from their native lands.

Yet at all times, and under all circumstances, the same character of stern unrelenting strictness and merciless severity in punishment marked the Roman discipline, down at least to those late periods of the decline of the Empire, when her military spirit gave way beneath the general corruption and ruin. The rod and the bludgeon were unsparingly employed by the officers, for what we should consider minor military offences; and the punishment of death, frequently accompanied with circumstances of great cruelty, was inflicted at the discretion of the commander, for such crimes or breaches of duty as he was pleased to consider of heinous magnitude.

The historian Polybius, who was the personal friend of the younger Scipio Africanus, and accompanied him in his campaigns, in the valuable account which he gives in his sixth book of the Roman military system, enumerates several of their punishments, and the occasions on which they were inflicted. After describing the very elaborate and strict system by which the vigilance of the sentries and patrols was provided for, he narrates the mode in which the slightest remissness in this duty was sure to be instantly detected and promptly punished.

A court-martial of the tribunes of the legions (answering to our colonels of regiments) was promptly summoned, and the delinquent arraigned before it. If found guilty, he was sentenced to the "fus tuarium," a punishment analogous to that of running the gauntlet, which is at present practised in the Austrian and Russian services, frequently with the most revolting cruelty.

The Roman soldier who was condemned to the "fustuarium" was led out into the middle of the camp before the assembled troops, and there received from his tribune (or colonel) a slight blow, upon which the whole soldiery fell upon the unhappy victim, and generally cudgelled and stoned him to death on the spot; and, even if he suc ceeded in staggering through the host of his executioners beyond the precincts of the camp, he had no hope of surviving the sentence, for no one dared receive or shelter him, and he was left to perish in utter destitution.

This terrible punishment, which every colonel of a legion had the power of ordering, was assigned not only to the offence of neglect of duty on guard, but to the crimes of theft and of bearing false witness; and it was also inflicted on the soldier who had been fined three times for the same offence, among the long list of minor delinquencies which the colonel had the power of punishing by imposing a pecuniary fine, and seizing any property of the offenders as security for payment.

We know from other sources that the centurions, whose position in the legion was analogous to that of non-commissioned officers in our regiments, enforced prompt obedience by summary blows with the stick which each centurion carried, and which was the distinguishing mark of his rank.* But, besides these authorities to inflict corporal chastisement, which the officers of each legion possessed, the general of the army was invested with unlimited power of life and death over all under his command. The assent of no court was necessary to make his sentences valid; there was no appeal from his jurisdiction; he saw, he judged, he condemned, and the punishment was inflicted at his bidding on the spot, and at the

* The Roman soldier was beaten with a vine stick. Pliny, in his eulogy on the

vine, mention this as one of the honours of the tree.

moment. This was the "imperium," the unlimited arbitrary power which the Romans thought it indispensably necessary to submit to, when serving in the legions, in order to secure safety and success to their country. Cicero describes it as being that "sine quo res militaris administrari, teneri exercitus, bellum geri non potest." The Romans well knew the gross abuse which the weakness or tyranny of individual generals was certain from time to time to make of this fearful and irresponsible authority; they knew that they themselves were liable to be its victims; but they preferred enduring these occasional oppressions, to risking the relaxation of their military discipline and fettering the energies of their commanders. Their maxim in war was,

"Ne'er to swerve

From rule, however stern, that tends their strength to nerve."

When, indeed, we remember the arbitrary and tyrannical spirit that characterized the Roman patricians in their conduct towards the plebeians during the early centuries of the Commonwealth, and bear in mind that the patricians, for a long time exclusively, and for a still longer time principally, held all high military commands, the soldierly self-sacrificing spirit of this remarkable people strikes the mind most forcibly. In all the various struggles made by the plebeians to obtain a fair participation in civil rights, in all the projects of their tribunes for curbing the oppressiveness of the patricians, no hint ever appears to have dropped, no idea ever entertained of mitigating their martial law, and limiting the despotism of the general over the soldier. Yet the plebeians themselves made up the legions. Rome employed no mercenary armies ; she did not then even fill her ranks with the refuse and rabble of her population, as is the case in the common modern mode of recruiting. On the contrary, the lowest class of citizens, all those whose property fell below a certain census, or who for some misbehaviour had been degraded and disfranchised, were, down to the time of Marius, considered ineligible to serve in the legions. That wonderful infantry, which overthrew Volscian, Etruscan, Gaul, Samnite, Epirote, Carthaginian, Greek, Spaniard, and Asiatic, was formed of the free middle classes of Rome, of men, who in peace were bold reformers, stout asserters of their civic rights, ready to rise and sacrifice all things rather than submit to the insolence of their oligarchs, but who, when once in the camp, when once inrolled and sworn under their country's banner, followed those oligarchs against any foe of Rome's, and upheld those oligarchs in the enforcement of their iron laws of war in all their sanguinary severity.

Even where the general in command was so hated by the plebeians serving under him, that they preferred being defeated to winning him a triumph, the punishments ordered by him were submitted to. Thus the army which an Appius Claudius led, in the third century of Rome, against the Volsci, and on which he avenged, by every species of severity, the mortification which he and his party had just experienced through the passing of the Publilian law, though it broke its ranks and fled when drawn out for action, suffered its oppressor, after the battle, to scourge and behead, with every circumstance of exasperating insult, all its centurions, and all the soldiers who had ever received military rewards, and then to decimate the rest of the legions, without resistance, and without an effort to escape. And though, after the close of the campaign, and the expiration of Appius's year of command, he was impeached for high state offences by the tribunes of the people, his • Livy, lib. ii. 59.

DONCASTER: ITS SPORTS AND SATURNALIA.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “GAMING, GAMING-HOUSES, and gamESTERS.”

"Sed mihi fas visa loqui."

What I have seen permit me to relate.

THE beautiful autumnal month of September, for such it may be considered in its proximity to the period

"When Libra weighs in equal scales the year,"

rich in earth's golden produce, and abundant with healthful sports and recreative English pastimes, may be taken as the crowning month of turf amusements, the last grand event of the racing year; for, although the Newmarket October meetings follow later in order of time, they are, in character and consequence, of comparatively trifling interest to the public, with the exception of the Cæsarawitch and Cambridgeshire stakes. The Newmarket meetings, at the best of times, attract only the real amateurs of racing, patrons of the turf, and the business professors of the ring; betting-men and book-makers, who study pedigree, and note the yearly performances, and record the capabilities of horses, as they graduate from yearlings until they enter the lists, as three-year-olds, for the great stakes at Epsom. Newmarket Heath does not, like the courses of Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood, Liverpool, Chester, and Doncaster, present to the view a large assemblage of elegant company, and a multitudinous concourse of persons collected from all parts of the kingdom to witness the scene; nor does it offer the gay and animated appearance which ordinarily distinguishes provincial race-meetings, that usually command the patronage and presence of the nobility and gentry, resident in the immediate and surrounding localities, and at the same time invite to holiday and recreative enjoyment the industrious and operative classes of the respective towns and their vicinities. Newmarket is a place for the business of racing, as distinct in its character from the sporting localities named, as is the Royal Exchange in its sombre and exclusive commercial transactions from the gay, diversified, and pleasurable appearance of Hyde Park in its zenith of fashionable season and display; no town-division of police is necessary to keep in awe and order the pressing and over-anxious multitude, nor is any constabulary aid required to clear, and keep free from intrusion, the arena of sport and speed. Conventional order and well understood arrangement characterize the whole proceedings on the heath. With the exception of two or three private carriages, a dozen hired post-chaises, as many vehicles of the denominations of gigs and taxed carts, a few sprigs of aristocracy on their thorough-breds, half-a-dozen stray Cantabs, and a score or two of the miscellaneous class known as betting-men, mounted on lean and sorry hacks, on which they make their hurried way from betting-post to betting-post, as business calls, all is pedestrian movement-the visitors consist chiefly of townsfolk, quorum magna pars may be said to be trainers, jockeys, stable-men, touts, and others connected with the numerous racing establishments. The scene, to any other than real amateurs of the sport, or to those trading in its

speculative results, is altogether dull and monotonous; not a petticoat or pretty face is to be seen, not a booth or stall of accommodation at which to refresh the inward man, nor a mountebank or merry-andrew to enliven the intervals of racing and astonish the gaping rustic. All is business, and that of the most exclusive character. The routine of a day for a visitor on Newmarket Heath is, in good truth, to watch the locomotive machine of the judge in its various journeyings and chnages from course to course (for Newmarket has some twenty different distances, so denominated), and to follow in its track; a determination to witness a full day's entertainment will not unfrequently subject the party, under the diversified arrangements of the day, to a somewhat lengthy and fatiguing journey, by reason of this necessary attendance on LordChief-Justice Clerk, as he proceeds on his judicial circuit. The town of Newmarket is equally dull and unattractive; its chief characteristic feature is the betting-room. Beyond this, it contains in the main street a few shops only, several large but irregularly built houses, with two inns of extensive character: the chief of the two is "The Rutland Arms,” which usually affords accommodation to the nobility and first class of visitors; the other, "The White Hart," is resorted to by the more general class-farmers, travellers, tradesmen, betting-men, and others. Newmarket contains, as may be imagined, many public-houses and drinking dens; and the town is literally overrun by that Lilliputian tribe of mischievous men in miniature, ycleped jockey-boys, who matriculate at this racing university, and graduate until they qualify and take degrees for the great stakes.

For the reasons assigned, Doncaster may be fairly, and by no means incorrectly, termed the crowning racing event of the year, as it is, without question, the last of any importance to which general attention is drawn, and in which the public exhibit anything like pleasurable interest.

The ides of September in modern times, like the ides of March in the Roman æra, are of portentous result; and although they threaten not in their advent the destruction of men and downfall of empires, yet is their dawn sometimes overcast to the bringing on of a heavy day, big with the fate of many a turf Cæsar. Doncaster is the great scene of action; the St. Leger, the all-absorbing and all-exciting event. At this racing period of the year the town is frightened from its ordinary quiet and propriety, and revolutionized into a scene of high carnival and revelry.

In relation to the great Doncaster meeting, and the interesting and important events connected therewith, the spirit of speculation can scarcely be said to be perfectly abroad until after the Epsom settlement, and the subsequent attractive and important meetings of Ascot, Goodwood, Liverpool, &c. These past, the great St. Leger becomes the immediate subject of business at "The Corner," and, as a matter of course, in all places of sporting notoriety throughout the kingdom, and particularly so in northern localities. The great London exchange does not at such time, owing to the far advanced state of the London season, and other causes operating to the same end, exhibit a very full attendance of the aristocracy of the turf; but these high and mighty ones are nevertheless actively engaged in the business of the approaching event, through the agency of Messrs. Hill, Clowes, and other safe and experienced members of the betting fraternity-persons who are as influential in raising or depressing the market by their operations, as is that mysterious personage, the government-broker, by his wholesale purchases or sales of funded

securities. At this period, the quotations of the market, or odds of the day, come under regular report, and emanate with great accuracy from the pen of Mr. Ruff, (author of the annual publication known as the "Turf Guide,") a gentleman most competentin the department, and who, besides possessing all the requisite knowledge and experience to fit him for the duty, has the intrinsic merit of honour and integrity in its discharge,and is, moreover, politely accessible and honestly obliging to all persons seeking information within the fair and reasonable scope of inquiry. Mr. Ruff reports the racing intelligence for all the leading journals. The weekly papers are under other arrangements; " Bell's Life" has its clever and respected reporter, Mr. Dowling; the "Sunday Times," the "Æra," "Observer," &c., have also their own special and very able employés, who sometimes indulge in more extensive comment and observation and go more minutely into the physiology of the sport,-their cue, however, on the actual state of business is taken from the authority of Mr. Ruff, who is, without question, de jure et de facto, the regular and acknowledged reporter of turf affairs, and derives therefrom a handsome and well-deserved income.

66

Doncaster, the immediate locality of the subject-matter of this paper, is a town of some magnitude, and of much interesting historical importance. Its situation is in the West Riding of the county of York; in the Saxon annals it is written Dona Cescen, and in the first charter granted to the town by King Richard the First, it is called Dane Castre. All authorities agree that it was, as its name imports, a Roman station; and a Roman votive altar of exquisite workmanship, discovered in 1781, proves by its sculpture and inscription the truth of the assertion. This altar, which was found in digging a cellar in St. Sepulchre's Gate, is recorded as being the third of the kind ever discovered in any part of the world; one of the others was found at Binchester, in Durham, and the other at Ribchester, in Lancashire. Doncaster was destroyed by lightning about the year 759, and, as related by the historian Camden, completely buried in its ruins. In the wars of the Roses, the battle of Toughton Field was fought between the contending armies of York and Lancaster, when nearly 40,000 were left dead on the field; and in Aske's rebellion of 1536, the town and its neighbourhood were the principal scenes of tumult and riot. Doncaster has obtained numerous charters in succession, from the time of Richard the First to that of James the Second. The corporation is composed of a mayor, recorder, town-clerk, twelve aldermen, and twenty-four common-councilmen. The town is not what can be correctly termed, in common acceptation, a trading town, beyond its mere retail traffic; it had formerly some note for knitted stockings, but is now undistinguished by any peculiar trade or manufacture; the main dependence of the shopkeepers and mechanics is upon persons of fortune resident in the neighbourhood, and on the custom (which is extensive) arising from a constant succession of travellers and visitors on their route to Edinburgh, and other northern localities. Doncaster has much to recommend it to the notice of the tourist; its general appearance is attractive, and it is most healthily situated; the houses are for the most part well and conveniently built; the High Street in particular, which is nearly a mile in extent, and for length, breadth, and beauty, may compete with most northern towns, presents to view some first-rate mansions of modern structure. The ancient church stands on the area of the old castle, and is a large

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