Jonas Snell was the last known person to be hanged in Wickham Market. The date was 1699. The crime was a heinous double murder. The criminal’s body hung in the gibbet cage at Potsford for 40 years. Legends tell of birds nesting in the skull.

Want to know all the grisly details? Warning – Here’s a story that’s not for the faint-hearted, with some of the story purportedly reported in the murder’s own words – including poetry!

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Taken from an article prepared for and published in the Wickham Market Parish News February 2025, courtesy of Phillip Tallent, Chairman of the Wickham Market Area Archive Centre. It includes quoted text which is an extract from the Woodbridge Reporter and Wickham Market Gazette of 22nd March 1894.

“Jonas Snell was hanged in Wickham Market street for the murder of John Bullard, his master, and John Bullard, his master’s father, at Letheringham Mill. In his confession as published by B. Smith, of Woodbridge, Snell says that he obtained leave from his master to visit his brother, but only proceeded as far as the Ufford Crown, where he drank one mug of beer. He then returned home and secretly entered the mill.

Having ransacked his master’s clothes for money in vain, he kept an eye on him to find where his money was secreted. Afterwards he took one of his master’s bottles and went to Easton Street and bought a pint of clover water and some biscuits.

He returned about midnight and found his master playing cards with neighbours. After they were gone, he says, “I went into the mill and took from thence a sledgehammer called a maul, and did strike him (the father) one blow on the right side of the head. I afterwards struck him (the son) on the hinder part of his head, and after that I struck both of them several times. I then took the door off its hinges and went towards my brother’s and about three o’clock in the morning I got to Wickham and designing to cross the nearest way I wandered up and down until morning light, thinking I had been near Ipswich, when I was not above two or three miles from the place where the murder was done“.

While in Bury gaol, Snell is said to have composed the following lines:

The father’s grey and aged head,
Received the leading blow;
Then, as I was by Satan led,
I struck the son also.
Who straight arose and likewise cried,
I had his father killed;
And ere I could be satisfied,
Their dearest blood I spilled.
He staggered and could hardly stand,
Having received a wound;
Then with the hammer in my hand,
I fell him to the ground.
I gave him many cruel blows,
Till they were murdered quite;
Which done I packed up all their clothes,
And so I took my flight.
With bleeding heart and melting eyes,
My crime I do bewail;
Good God be pleased to hear my cries,
Tho’ in a loathsome gaol.”

Was the murderer really so literate and creative to have composed those lines? Does his ghost really haunt the site of the gibbet post and his burial in Potsford Wood? That’s for you to consider – and explore… Why not walk to Potsford Wood, following the 5.5 mile circular Byng Brook & Potsford Walk from Wickham Market Centre… if you dare?  

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The Potsford gibbet and its the story I Find out more