The Sun.
London, England, 1869-01-11 00:00:00

THE. NORWICH MURDER.

it appears to be now supposed that William Sheward,
who is charged on his own confession with the murder of
nis first wife, Martha Sheward, at Norwich, in June 1851.
will retract his confession, and that he and his friends
will endeavour to shew that when he made his
statement he was labouring under a kind of monomania.
The confession of Sheward seems to be verified by the
facts which have been bronght to light, except in one
particular, and that is certainly a material one. At
the time of the murder Mrs. Sheward must have been
approaching her 60th year, and the witnesses examined
on Friday, barore the Norw:ch magistrates, referred to
her as "an old woman." But the medical gentlemen who
examined the remains found near Norwich in June and
July 1851, came to the conclusion that they were those of
a young woman. This will be seen by the annexed
copy of an official placard issued at Norwich towards the
close of June 1851 :--" Several parts of a human body
belonging to a person supposed to h4ve been recently
murdered, and to be that of a young woman between the
ages of ' and 26 years, having been within the last few
days foul 1 in the environs of Norwich, information
is r, (poste 1 to be given to the chief constable,
at the police-office, Guildhall, Norwich, of all femal s
who have been recently missing, together with any parti-
culars
which may lead to the detection of the person cr
persons who committed the supposed murder. The por-
tions of the body already found comprise the right hand
and foot and several bones, with numerous pieces of skin
and flesh. Further search is making for the head and
remaining parts of the body.—H. WOODCOCK, Mayor,
Guildhall, Norwich, June 27, 1851." It is obviously most
important that this discrepancy in the evidence should
be explained away if possible, and that the best medical
testimony on the subject should be obtained. The
remains will be disinterred from the collar or vault, in
the Norwich Guildhall, in wh'&l they have been so long
buried ; whether it will be possible to solve the questions
as to the age of the woman of whom they formed a part I
remains to be seen. A shirt much smeared with blood
was found on Mousehold Heath, near Norwich, contem-
poraneously with the discovery of the remains ; this shirt
was taken to the Norwich police-station, and was kept for
some time, but after some months it was unfortunately
destroyed, and no evidence can be consequently produced
as to whom it belonged. With reference to the '
neglect of the local authorities to hold an inquest, it
may be remarked that a theory gained credence at the
time that the remains had been distributed by some
medical students, and that they formed part of a corpse
which had been experimented upon. Dr. Ranking, a
medical gentleman now dead, who also looked at the
remains, stoutly, however, opposed this conclusion at
the time, as he thought that the bones, flesh, &c., had
been carelessly hacked asunder, and had not been sepa-
rated in a scientific manner. Of the medical gentlemen
who were officially consulted by the magistrates in 1851,
one (Mr. B. H. Norgate) is dead, and the two others, •
Mr. W. P. Nichols and Dr. Donald Dalrymple, are still
living, and residing in or near Norwich. Dr. Dalrymple,
it may be added, is now member for Bath.

THE IRISH PAPERS ON THE MURDER

OF MR. BAKER.

The position taken by the " patriotic " papers of Ireland
en the murder of Mr. Baker is rather peculiar. This
time they disagree very materially. The Weekly
Yews expresses unaffected horror at it, as utterly
destitute of extenuating circumstances. The Irish-
man regards it with characteristic complacency. The
spirit in which the tragedy is noticed appears in
the following extract :—" The advent of our new Viceroy
has been ominously heralded by one of those occurrences
which a cant phraseology des'gnates as ' agrarian crimes.'
A landlord has been shot. He has been put to death
because there were men who believed that in his dealings
with his tenants he had violated the great laws of justice
and humanity in such a manner as to demand retri-
bution. They believed, further, that there was no.
human law to enforce retribution or to give redress.
They took the law into their own hands, or, rather, they
inflicted punishment without law. This is the whole and
the naked truth. It is so as to the killing of Mr. Baker—
it is so as to all the killings in which vengeance has been
executed upon landlords. It were very easy to involve and
obscure the plain truth by unmeaning phrases
upon one side or the other. Nothing is easier
than to declaim against assassination, to write
fine sentences about 'the mysterious behests of a
secret Legislature.' Words like this may obscure, but they
cannot alter facts. Landlords in Ireland are shot because
the people believe that they do acts which ought not to go
unpunished. The law is on the side of the landlords who
perpetrate these acts. The popular conscience is against
them. More than this—not only the popular conscience but
the popular instinct of self-preservation calls for a penalty
that may deter men from acts which aim at the very life of
the people. This is the whole philosophy of agrarian
crime.' • Agrarian crime is the necessary, the inevitable
result of a system which places the very lives of the people
at the disposal of a few men. Mr. Baker is the most recent
victim of this system. If that system be not speedily
changed, he will not be the last." The following is the
moral which the Irishman draws :—" It is the wicked
and tyrannical system of our land laws which
is responsihle for every event like that of the killing
of Mr. Baker. The law that vests in the landlord the
power of capricious eviction drives the tenantry into those
leagues of self-defence which visit acts of extermination
with a retribution that is in reality protective. If we
desire to put an end to such retributions, there is but
one way of doing it, and that is by putting an end
to the power which provokes them. . . . . This
is the Irish question with which Lord Spencer has to
deal lf he attempts to govern Ireland while he
leaves the land question' unsettled, he may rest assured
'hat the deed of blood which has so unfortunately
marked the commencement of his government is but the
prelude and the warning of many more. The real Ties*
'ion between the Irish people and the English Govern-
ment is the right to the Irish soil. Until this is adjusted
the attempt to pacify Ireland by the settlement' of
any other question is but a mockery, a delusion, and
a snare.' No matter what is done upon other questions,
behind them all stands the great question which must one
day be decided—the great question which is one of the
existence of the Irish nation. Is the land of Ireland to
he held for the purposes of the interest, the tyranny, or
the caprice of a few individuals, or are proprietary rights
in that soil to be so modified and controlled as still to leave
the land of Ireland a property to which the mass of the
Irish people may assert some claim—at least the claim of
having a right to live in their native land?"