Dear Mr Cornwell, First let me thank you for all the pleasure that reading your books has given me. I find your notes at the back very interesting. (The last, Gallows Thief, I read in NZ and passed it on to a Kiwi friend fascinated by English history!) I was interested in your notes in this book, about the almost carnival atmosphere at a public hanging. My late mother left me a collection of lace bobbins; the shaft of one is decorated with the name ‘W Worsley hung 1868’. She found that he was William Worsley but I haven’t found out anything more about him. Do you know whether commemorative bobbins like this one would have been made to peddle at hangings? Or might this have been an occasional thing, for relatives of the victim perhaps? I’d be interested to hear what you might know – many thanks, Juliet Lewis