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Summary:

Combe Gibbet is a double gibbet standing 25 feet (7.6 metres) high on the summit of Inkpen Beacon, about four miles south of Hungerford, but clearly visible from the town in fine weather. It marks the boundary between Inkpen and Combe, and stands in the middle of a neolithic long-barrow.

Local folklore is that it was first erected in 1676 to hang the bodies of a local man and woman who had been hanged at Winchester jail after being found guilty of murdering the man's wife and son. This article expands on this traditional story, which can be found under Combe Gibbet.

The following article was written by Dr Donald Peck and presented to the Virtual Museum August 2026.

Combe Gibbet and the later Combe Gallows on Gallows Down:

In August 1879 the Newbury and District Field Club conducted what sounds like a leisurely tour of the villages along the scarp of the downs and took in the parish of Combe near the end. They were inspired to go to Combe Gibbet by the story which Patricia Sears has now researched very fully and proved that the story of Combe gallows was no myth - see ‘The True Story of the Black Legend and Combe Gibbet’.

Richard Kimber of Eastwick (born in 1809) was the Club’s guide in 1879. Richard was keen on the story of the Gibbet because he was the owner of the remains of the famous, ancestral, then supposedly 200-year old leg of pork which dated, he said, from the same day as the hangings. The pork was put in a glass case in 1863 and documented in 1870 and moved to the Newbury Museum – where it is on display following restoration. Richard said that he had last tasted it in 1825 when his family gave some to a couple of people for Christmas lunch, garnished with white currants from the gardenRichard Kimber on the same occasion boasted of having over 200 fox brushes and on one famous day, of hunting three foxes (and being awarded the brushes of two of them), followed by a ride to Andover for a late market the same evening.

OGS Crawford, an eminent, though perhaps also eccentric, archaeologist most famous for his aerial surveys of Salisbury Plain in the 1920s, led another visit of the Newbury Field Club to Combe and Netherton in 1964. Commander Britton Roberts then produced ‘two teeth and jaw chippings found by his wife 30 yards from the gibbet’.

In 1964 the furthest back that the Field Club could trace the gibbet story was this: they learnt that George Cummings, who had died 1901 at 91 had told how, as a boy of nine in 1819/20, he led one of the horses bringing a tree from Combe wood, to erect a new gibbet: 25 ft high with 6 ft of it below ground. George Cummings was a labourer and quite an important figure in the farm life of Combe throughout his long life (see the HVM article on ‘The Dispute over Wadsmere Common in 1840-43”, which featured George as a successful litigant).

They also found tales of the history of the gibbet: a dispute was said to have arisen at time of the construction of the gibbet because the murder was said to have taken place in Combe, whereas a nearby pond into which the bodies were thrown was in Inkpen. The pond could possibly be Wigmoreash pond, the important hilltop pond 0.4 mile west of the Gibbet, on top of the downs just north of the track along the downs, just where a path leads down to Combe via Wrights Farm (past what would then have been known as Buttermere Corner). The parish of Combe undertook the cost, and a fresh boundary was drawn and added 2.5 acres to the parish including the pond.

These are echoes of possibly ancient disputes between the parishes of Combe and Inkpen (and note that the two villages incidentally were never in the same county or diocese until 1895). Boundaries were very important then. They were key elements of land grants recorded in Anglo-Saxon charters; boundary routes and, in some cases, markers were often maintained by annual beating of the bounds of the parish carried out by local people physically walking right round the whole parish.

Parish boundaries were more important if, like at Combe Gibbet, they were boundaries between counties (and before the time of counties, between hundreds), and even more so if they were on the top of an escarpment and highly visible. In prehistoric times and still in Anglo-Saxon times parish boundaries were very often the sites of executions and of burials of the people executed (particularly on chalk downlands in the 9th-10th centuries, in what archaeologist Adrian Reynolds calls ‘deviant burials’, bodies buried decapitated, upside down or with hands tied together).

At Combe, in addition to the long barrow on which the Combe gibbet and gallows were later erected, nearby there are many other prominent tumuli or beorgs (distinct from burhs = castle/hillfort) from the Iron Age or earlier, for example along the ridgeway path to the west of the Gibbet, towards Oswald’s Burh, as identified in Saxon charters of the 8th-9th centuries BCE. This burh fortification is close to the prominent beech copse 2 miles further west which has several barrows on it and near it, and it features clearly in the charter boundaries for the parishes of both Ham and Buttermere/Linkenholt (known as ’Ashmere)’.

The tumuli here were all erected to be seen from afar. The Combe Gibbet tumulus also probably became an assembly place for similar reasons, as assembly places are common on the boundaries between parishes, and would be used to sort out disputes between parishes over land boundaries (which might be the background to the story of Wigmoreash) and stray animals or disputed grazing (though downland grazing was often amicably, or by formal ‘intercommoning’ agreement, shared between neighbouring parishes in the Saxon and post-Saxon farming system, which combined both organised, centralised manors like Combe and dispersed forest villages with smaller manors like Inkpen).

Across England, Ordnance Survey maps show many hills with gallows on them and some with gibbets on them. Gibbets and gallows were invariably in prominent locations, even more often than tumuli and assembly places - the main point of gibbeting was of course to discourage people from committing crimes. Under the barbarous laws still very much in force in eighteenth century England, judges could choose whether a convict due to be hanged should be given to anatomists for scientific purposes or alternatively gibbeted; the latter required an iron cage to be made to hold the body in place for the longest possible time and fastened high up a pole. Gibbeting went on in England until the end of the eighteenth century, so at the Combe site it is quite likely that a gibbet was erected and possibly used at some point, but it is not clear when that was, or if towards the end of the period such a gibbet would have been used for purely symbolic purposes. If so the lasting memory of the gibbet is, at Combe, an effective result!

On nineteenth century maps, Combe Down becomes Gallows Down. Barbarous gibbets had by then all morphed into not quite so barbarous gallows. We actually have a telling story about the 1790s (recounted in the Newbury Weekly News in 1927 and vouched for by a local vicar) of a series of executions which took place there, as follows: “Three men from the same family were hanged there – a drover family with gipsy blood, Jim White and his sons George and Bill. First of all, it was George, who took a horse at St Mary Bourne and was sentenced to death and ordered to be hung at Combe. When he was led out, his father’s voice rang out: ‘Die game, George, die game’. And it is said that George turned one look towards his father and died game. Bill was soon caught riding a flea-bitten mare taken from a stable in Weyhill. The whole scene was repeated. Jim White’s turn then came. He was tried for stealing a dark chestnut from a field near Newbury. Carriages came from miles around and thousands walked or drove in carts or wagons to see Jim White hang”.

Across the eighteenth century, gibbeting had been occurring in Hampshire on average twice a decade, more frequently than in any English other county except Middlesex (for London). Before the 1790s gibbeting had come to an end. But the occasional practice of hanging criminals at the scene of their crimes, or at prominent sites nearby which could hold and would attract large crowds, continued, though with decreasing frequency, across the first quarter of the nineteenth century (as has been shown in the recent work of Susan Tarlow and Steve Poole). Hence the executions of the three drovers from the White family in the 1790s and the gradual emergence of the name Gallows Down.

See also:

- Combe Gibbet

- Manors and Combe - A short background to manorial agriculture in southern England and why manorial farming characterized the whole period from before 1000 to after 1350 and continued to influence life and farming in the following centuries.

- Combe and the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin - Combe (c 2,200 acres including woodland) as it appears from the account rolls of the owner of the manor, the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin, in the Middle Ages:

- Combe as a manor of Bec in the Middle Ages - from the custumal records of Bec-Hellouin.

- Combe and its landless cottagers - the Wadsmere Common dispute of 1840-43 and beyond. 

- Combe Gibbet, 1950 - abstract from brochure.