Last week we republished some extracts from Dr. Vernon Coleman’s ‘Commonplace Book’.  Below are some additional extracts from the same book.

In the following, Dr. Coleman tells us the true and astonishing story of Sawney Beane and his family and lists seven things he would have liked to have witnessed.

By Dr. Vernon Coleman

In olden times (before even I was born) it was customary for ladies and gentlemen to keep a scrapbook containing items they’d collected from books, magazines and newspapers. They’d add in quotes and snippets from conversations they had remembered and wanted to write down to keep. Those volumes were called “commonplace” books.

My newly published commonplace book contains stories, anecdotes, lists, comments, quotes, etc., which I think you’ll enjoy. The book also includes some of my recollections and idle thoughts. I hope you’ll find new facts, thought-provoking opinions and titbits of information which will make you want to say: “Hey, listen to this…!”

Cannibalism in Scotland: The Strange Tale of Sawney Beane

You may not have heard of Sawney Beane. Some Scots (ashamed and embarrassed perhaps) like to pretend that he didn’t exist. But he did. He was as real as Haggis and Robert Burns. He was born in East Lothian, Scotland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (the first one, not the second one) and when he found the family trade of hedging and ditching to be too much like hard work, he found a wife and set off to find a less strenuous life. The young couple chose to live in a cave on the rocky coast of Galloway. The cave was deep and required no expenditure, though the front of it filled with water at high tide.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Beane were keen on hard work and not terribly enthusiastic about growing food or hunting for it. They quickly realised that humans were the type of quarry easiest to catch. There were plenty of travellers on the nearby highway and the people wandering by, on horseback or on foot, weren’t usually armed or prepared to defend themselves. Moreover, humans wore clothing which could be appropriated and recycled.

The Beanes started in quite a small way. They clubbed to death solitary travellers and the consumable pieces they didn’t eat raw they pickled and stored to provide for rainy days.

But as the Beane family grew, so they found that the odd traveller didn’t satisfy all their requirements and they started to travel further afield into the countryside. Soon the number of unexplained disappearances grew and became something of a talking point in the region. When individuals or families disappeared, suspicions fell on strangers who were frequently arrested on suspicion of murder. Local innkeepers were arrested and executed too and eventually most of the local hostelries closed. The authorities tried to find out what was going on but got nowhere. Indeed, some of those looking for answers did not return from their investigations.

As the Beane children grew so they were recruited to the family business. The young Beanes didn’t meet outsiders without killing and eating them and so they bred exclusively among themselves.

The Beanes may have been psychopaths but they were not entirely stupid. They kept the entrance to their cave free of litter (bones and such like) and tried to ensure that there were no witnesses to their killing.

Things went well for the Beanes and they had been eating people for thirty years when disaster struck.

The Beanes attacked a man and his wife who were riding a horse back from a fair. They pulled the woman from the horse and cut her throat. However, the husband wasn’t so easy to kill and while the girls of the family drank the woman’s blood, he used his sword and pistol to attack the rest of the Beane family. He was so successful in this that he was still alive when a group of twenty travellers from the fair appeared, saw what was happening and joined in. The Beanes, not accustomed to defending themselves, fled the scene.

There were now witnesses to what was going on in the area.

The Provost of Glasgow was informed and he passed on the news to King James (who was the Scottish monarch at the time) and the king, accompanied by four hundred soldiers and a pack of bloodhounds hurried into the area.

Eventually, the bloodhounds found the Beane’s cave and all the members of the family were arrested. There were by then the original two Beanes plus eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. The ceiling of the cave was decorated with a larder of dangling limbs and the corners of the cave were full of stolen clothing, weapons and jewellery.

It wasn’t considered necessary to waste public money on a trial.

Sawney Beane and his large family were taken first to Edinburgh and then to Leith. Sawney, his sons and grandsons all had their hands and feet chopped off and Mrs. Beane, the daughters and granddaughters were placed on a pyre and burned to death. They all cursed a good deal but not one of them repented.

And that is the true and astonishing story of Sawney Beane and his family.

Witness

Here is a list of seven things I would have liked to have witnessed.
1) Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the temple.
2) Jesus Christ giving the sermon on the mount.
3) Moses parting the Red Sea.
4) Cromwell dissolving Parliament.
5) Elizabeth 1st’s speech at Tilbury.
6) Churchill being saved by Lawrence of Arabia when threatened by a crowd of angry Arabs.
7) Napoleon returning from Elba and turning the army behind him.

Chemotherapy

The word “chemotherapy” is much misunderstood. It has been hijacked to mean the treatment of disease (usually cancer) with a cytotoxic substance (something that kills cells). But the word really means the treatment of a disease with a chemical substance. If you take aspirin for a headache or an antibiotic for an infection you are undergoing chemotherapy. This definition may sometimes be used in rather disingenuous ways.

Extraordinary students

These days, students can be thrown out of university for making a thoughtless comment on social media or appearing in an inappropriate video on the internet. It wasn’t always this way. Beau Nash, who styled himself the King of Bath, and was a student at Jesus College, Oxford, got away without censorship even though he rode naked through an Oxfordshire village. He was sitting on a cow at the time. Lord Byron attended Trinity College, Cambridge and responded to the college’s “no dogs” rule by arriving with a pet bear in tow. The 2nd Earl of Rochester began his studies at Wadham College, Oxford at the age of 13 and quickly became notorious and debauched. He left with an MA a year later. Mad Jack Mytton arrived at Cambridge University in 1816 with 2,000 bottles of port to sustain him. But he got bored and left. Still, students did sometimes get into trouble in days gone by. In 1883, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, expelled all female students. Their crime? They weren’t male.

Crooks

In no area of life are there as many convicted criminals as there are in politics.

The above extracts are from Vernon Coleman’s Commonplace Book – just published. You can buy a copy from the bookshop on his website HERE.

About the Author

Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books.  He has written over 100 books which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read.

There are no ads, no fees and no requests for donations on Dr. Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you want to help finance his work, please just buy a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman in print on Amazon.