ABSTRACT
In August 1851 at Gloucester Assizes, Richard Kear, aged twenty-four years, and four other young male colliers appeared, charged with the rape of Mary M ’Carthy. Altogether nine men had been involved. Finding Mary ‘exhausted and resting’ in the Forest of Dean they directed her towards a house for some water. She refused to enter but was threatened with a shovel and with being burnt alive. Afterwards, she went to the workhouse where the doctor ‘confirmed her injuries’. All five charged were found guilty of rape and either ‘transported for their natural lives’ or sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Twenty-five years later, in the same month and at the same court, Richard Morgan and nine other men aged between seventeen and twenty-seven appeared before M r Justice Grove, charged with raping, or aiding and abetting the rape of Jane Goodall. She was also walking through the Forest of Dean with one of the defendants, William Barrett, but left him, apparently drunk, to rest. Nine men then accosted her; four ‘committed the outrage’ while the others held her down. Barrett ‘offered no assistance’ to her, but on ‘hearing her screams’, several other men did. They later identified the prisoners and the ‘individual outrages committed’. One man was acquitted, two were convicted of rape and sentenced to fifteen years. The rest received ten years imprisonment as accessories to the crime, as the judge believed that ‘all would have committed the full act’ had it not been for the intervention of the witnesses.
