William Harrison was an elderly genteel landowner living in Chipping Campden. One afternoon in 1660 around the time Charles II was appointed to the British throne reviving the House of Stuart and the monarchy he announced that was going to walk two miles to inspect some of his properties in the nearby village of Ebrington. While he was in his early 70s this was a journey of a kind that Harrison took regularly, and he was expected home that evening.
When Harrison did not return the alarm was raised, and his wife sent a manservant John Perry to search for him. The next morning neither Harrison nor Perry had returned. Edward Harrison, William’s son, then went out to search for both men. He soon came across Perry who said that he was returning from Ebrington where one of Harrison the elder’s tenants advised that he had spent the night.
The two men continued their search but could not find any trace of William Harrison until they stumbled upon his hat which had been slashed with a sharp implement, along with a shirt and a neckband, also cut and stained with blood. There was however, no sign of a body, whether murdered, or just grievously injured.
Under questioning after the discovery John Perry announced that he thought that William Harrison had been murdered. This led to Perry being considered a suspect and pressed strongly as to whether he was the murderer or otherwise know who the killer was. At a time when forensic evidence was rudimentary at best, it was very hard to prove who had committed a crime without confessions or wittness’ testimony. During his interrogation John Perry began to claim that his brother Richard and mother Joan had robbed and murder William Harrison, weighted his body, and thrown it into a millpond. Upon their arrest both Richard and Joan denied the murder, and a search of the watercourse turned up no body, but all three were remanded for trial at the next county assizes.
At the assizes the family were tried for robbery and murder under Early Modern conspiracy and joint enterprise laws. The sole evidence against the trio was John’s testimony. During the trial it was established that a week prior to the murder John had lied about being attacked by robbers on the road between Ebrington and Chipping Campden, that Joan and Richard had stolen more than one hundred pounds worth of goods from the Harrison household with John’s connivance in the year prior to their attack on William, that the series of thefts had been instigated by John, although it was Richard and Joan who had carried them out, and that John was a credible witness because there was no reason for him to have lied about any of this.
Purportedly the family was advised by their legal counsel to plead guilty in the face of the evidence presented against them, because the recently passed Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660, which was primarily a truth and reconciliation type measure encompassing combatants in the mid-17th Century Civil Wars, gave them, as people of previously blameless character, a route to a pardon and being spared execution.
However, as proceedings progressed the judge advised that due to no corpse having been recovered he was unwilling to hear the charges of murder. This meant the decision to plead guilty went against the family, as the county authorities decided to try and get a murder conviction at the next assizes session in the spring of 1661, and at this trial, which did go ahead, they were no longer of previously good character due to their previous robbery conviction, so in-eligible for a pardon.
At this trial all three members of the Perry family opted to plead not guilty. However, despite the lack of a body, this time the trial proceeded and the jury found all three guilty upon the basis of John Perry’s earlier testimony.
Shortly after their conviction the Perry’s were taken to Broadway Hill where a gallows had been erected. Reputedly the famed Broadway Tower, errected in the 1790s, stands on the site of the place of execution. Broadway Hill is now in Worcestershire, part of the Cotswold escarpment, and at 310 metres above sea level, the second tallest peak in the Cotswolds National Landscape. It was common practice for robbers who had committed murder in the early modern period to be executed in prominent locations near the site of their crimes. Gibbet Hill on the southern edge of Coventry gets its name for an infamous case of this kind around a century after the events of the Campden Wonder.
On the day of the execution in line with folk custom Joan Perry was executed first, to see whether she was a witch, and her death would lead to the spell she had cast over her sons being broken. After she was confirmed dead both John and Richard maintained their innocence, and they were then executed simultaneously.
Which would have marked the end of the sorry tale, until a year later in 1662, a ship from Portugal docked in Dover and William Harrison stepped off. Upon his return to Chipping Campden Harrison relayed a fabulous tale of being seriously wounded and abducted by masked assailants on the road between Ebrington and Chipping Campden. They had then tended his wounds, stuffed his pockets with money, and spirited him hog-tied on horseback to Deal in Kent where he been smuggled onboard a ship bound for the Ottoman Empire. Upon his arrival in Turkey he was sold for a couple of pounds to a Turkish sea captain who spirited him even further east where he was sold again. He then lived for around twenty one months as a slave somewhere in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, before his master died, and his grieving family released him from slavery to return to England.
It seems doubtful that many people believed this story in 1662 and even fewer have in the centuries since. But there is now no way of knowing where William Harrison actually vanished overseas for a couple of years, why he did so, and what made him come back. One theory advanced by the historian and popular writer Linda Stratmann is that the impending return of the Stuart dynasty made it opportune for him to leave the country for a bit, and it had always been his intention to return. However, without knowing more about Harrison’s political and religious opinions, affiliations, and actions during the tumultuous years of the early and mid-17th Century, it is impossible to know whether this was his motivation.
Either way, Harrison’s bizarre late life disappearing act, has resonated down the centuries, not least because of the way in which it caused three entirely innocent people who just happened to be in close proximity to the disappearance, to be dragged through the Early Modern justice system and ultimately executed. There is undoubtedly something of a dark Jacobean tragedy about the whole affair. So perhaps unsurprisingly in the subsequent decades the story of Harrison’s disappearance, the circumstances around it, and the miscarriage of justice has inspired numerous storytellers. Including in the 20th and 21st Centuries at least three crime novelists two plays by John Masefield (mid-20th Century Britain’s poet laureate and author of The Box of Delights), a BBC Radio Four serial in the 1990s and most recently a heavy metal ballad by the British band Inkubus Sukkubus.