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The Traveler… inhumanity at its worst…

Today’s travels took me to Gloucester, England by the way of The Glocester Journal dated August 17, 1767 [1]. I found a very horrific report on the barbaric treatments that Elizabeth blog-8-21-2017-barbaricBrownrigg did to the girl apprentices. She had beaten the one girl so viciously that, even though she had been found, the doctors were not able to save her life.  “On Sunday morning one of the unfortunate girls who were cruelly beaten, and otherwise most barbarously treated by the their mistress… of the wounds she received from there said inhuman mistress… when it appeared by the evidence of the of the surviving girl, that, about a year and a half ago, the deceased was put apprentice, and was upon trial about a month, during which she eat and drank as the family did; that soon after her mistress, Elizabeth Brownrigg, began to beat and ill-treat the deceased, sometimes with a walking-cane, at other times with a horsewhip or a postillion’s whip… and beat her with a whalebone riding-whip on several parts of her body, and with the butt-end, divers times about the head, the blood gushing from her head and other parts of her body;…” A neighbor hearing noises from the lower area of the house had her journeyman investigate it and that is how she was found.

~The Traveler