It was oval in shape, and had evidently been
formed by excavating the chalk in the centre, and building up the sides
with it to the height of about thirty feet. It measured 345 feet by 340,
and was supposed to have provided ample accommodation for the men and
beasts that figured in the sports, in addition to about 13,000
spectators.
In the year 1705 quite 10,000 people assembled there to witness the
strangling and burning of a woman named Mary Channing, who had murdered
her husband. This woman, whose maiden name was Mary Brookes, lived in
Dorchester with her parents, who compelled her to marry a grocer in the
town named Richard Channing, for whom she did not care. Keeping company
with some former gallants, she by her extravagance almost ruined her
husband, and then poisoned him. At the Summer Assizes in 1704 she was
tried, but being found pregnant she was removed, and eighteen weeks
after her child was born, she was, at the following Lent Assizes,
sentenced to be strangled and then burned in the middle of the area of
the amphitheatre. She was only nineteen years of age, and insisted to
the last that she was innocent.
About a hundred years before that a woman had suffered the same penalty
at the same place for a similar offence.
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