In Pasquils Jests and Mother Bunches Merriments, a book of facetiae very popular in the 16th century, a story is told of a criminal at the Oxford Assizes who “prayed his clergy,” and a Bible was accordingly handed to him that he might read a verse.  He could not read a word, however, which a scholar who chanced to be present observing, he stood behind him and prompted him with the verse he was to read; but coming towards the end, the man’s thumb happened to cover the remaining words, and so the scholar, in a low voice, said:  “Take away thy thumb,” which words the man, supposing them to form part of the verse he was reading, repeated aloud, “Take away thy thumb”—­whereupon the judge ordered him to be taken away and hanged.  And in Taylor’s Wit and Mirth (1630):  “A fellow having his book [that is, having read a verse in the Bible] at the sessions, was burnt in the hand, and was commanded to say:  ’May God save the King.’  ‘The King!’ said he, ’God save my grandam, that taught me to read; I am sure I had been hanged else.’”

The verse in the Bible which a criminal was required to read, in order to entitle him to the “benefit of clergy” (the beginning of the 51st Psalm, “Miserere mei"), was called the “neck-verse,” because his doing so saved his neck from the gallows.  It is sometimes jestingly alluded to in old plays.  For example, in Massinger’s Great Duke of Florence, Act iii, sc. 1: 

  Cataminta.—­How the fool stares!

  Fiorinda.—­And looks as if he were conning his neck-verse;

and in the same dramatist’s play of The Picture: 

          Twang it perfectly,
  As if it were your neck-verse.

In the anonymous Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell (1603), Act ii, sc. 1, we find this custom again referred to: 

  Farnese.—­Ha, hah!  Emulo not write and read?

  Rice.—­Not a letter, an you would hang him.

  Urcenze.—­Then he’ll never be saved by his book.

In Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, the moss-trooper, William of Deloraine, assures the lady, who had warned him not to look into what he should receive from the Monk of St. Mary’s Aisle, “be it scroll or be it book,” that

  “Letter nor line know I never a one,
  Were’t my neck-verse at Haribee”—­

the place where such Border rascals were usually executed.

It was formerly the custom to sing a psalm at the gallows before a criminal was “turned off.”  And there is a good story, in Zachary Gray’s notes to Hudibras, told of one of the chaplains of the famous Montrose; how, being condemned in Scotland to die for attending his master in some of his expeditions, and being upon the ladder and ordered to select a psalm to be sung, expecting a reprieve, he named the 119th Psalm, with which the officer attending the execution complied (the Scottish Presbyterians were great psalm-singers in those days), and it was well for him he did so, for they had sung it half through before the reprieve came.  Any other psalm would certainly have hanged him!  Cotton, in his Virgil Travestie, thus alludes to the custom of psalm-singing at the foot of the gallows: