The hanging Judge - Bloody Assizes Dorchester Dorset 1685

Jeffreys was born on the family estate of Acton Hall, Wrexham in North Wales, he was the sixth son of John and Margaret Jeffreys. His grandfather, John Jeffreys died in 1622 had been Chief Justice of the Anglesey circuit of the Great Sessions and his father, another John Jeffreys 1608 - 1691 was a Royalist during the English Civil War and fought for Charles I but was reconciled to The Protectorate and served as a Sheriff in 1655.

St Peters Church High West Street Dorchester Dorset

Photographs taken for The Dorset Guide and are not to be used within any publications without permission
Hanging Judge - Judge Jeffreys 6 High West Street Dorchester Dorset

His elder brothers were to become people of note; Thomas, later Sir Thomas knighted in 1686 was to become British Consul in Spain, and William became a vicar at Holt, Wales from 1668 - 1675. His younger brother, James, made a good ecclesiastical career, becoming Vice-Dean of Canterbury in 1685.

George was educated at Shrewsbury School from 1652 - 1659, his grandfather's old school, where he was periodically tested by a friend of his mother's, Philip Henry; then St Paul's School, London from 1659 - 1661 and Westminster School, London from 1661 - 1662. He became an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge University in 1662, leaving after one year without graduating and entering the Inner Temple in 1663.

The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple is one of the four Inns of Court around the Royal Courts of Justice in London which may call members to the Bar and so entitle them to practise as barristers.

Monmouth Rebellion - Bloody Assizes

The Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis harbour in 1685 which saw the start of the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II. This had a huge and devastating impact on both Dorset and Somerset.

As the Duke went about the Dorset countryside drumming up support for his challenge to the throne, his followers couldn't have imagined how brutally the uprising would be dealt with. After Monmouth's army was defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset only six weeks after he landed, the King ordered for Monmouth's followers to be found and tried for treason.
Judge Jeffreys, so notorious that he was named "the hanging judge", headed up the investigative team and scoured the West Country for Monmouth's followers.

In 1685, One of Dorchester's more infamous residents Judge Jeffreys went to Dorchester and lodged at 6 High West Street Dorchester, (now the restaurant, Judge Jeffreys). The Bloody Assizes were held in the Oak Room (now a Tea Room) of the Antelope Hotel on the 5th day of September. Judge Jeffreys is said to have a secret passage from his lodgings to the Oak Room. During the Dorchester Assizes a total two hundred and ninety two prisoners were tried by the commission of Judges; of these seventy four werehung, drawn and quartered in the town at Gallows Hill, the heads of some being displayed on spikes outside St. Peters church opposite the Judges lodgings and other bits of them distributed around the country.  One hundred and seventy five were transported d to plantations Barbados and Jamaica for ten years as slaves in the West Indies  ONLY twenty nine were pardoned.   Jeffreys left Dorchester to continue the Bloody Assizes in Exeter and then Taunton and Bristol.

Jeffreys didn’t believe in half measures and hanged, transported, whipped and fined hundreds of the unfortunate accused. He got a taste of his own medicine in 1688 at the fall of  James II.  He tried to escape from London disguised as a sailor. He escaped the noose he had prescribed for so many in his own courtroom, but was sent to the Tower of London, where he died aged 44, as the result of kidney disease.

A chronicoller wrote Jeffreys, made all the West an Aceldama; some places quite depopulated and nothing to be seen in 'em but forsaken walls, unlucky gibbets and ghostly carcases. The trees were loaden almost as thick with quarters as leaves; the houses and steeples covered as close with heads as at other times with crows or ravens. Nothing could be liker hell than all those parts; nothing so like the devil as he. Caldrons hizzing, carkases boyling, pitch and tar sparkling and glowing, blood and limbs boyling and tearing and mangling, and he the great director of all."