What the heck is a lek?
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
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The medal commemorates the hanging of a sailor, John Curtis, for the murder on 28 December 1767 of a Jewish pedlar, Wolf Myers. The medal was commissioned by a prominent member of the Portsmouth Jewish community, Abraham Woolf, and made by a Salisbury engraver, Isaac Levi or Levy of Catherine Street.
The story behind this medal is extraordinary, involving highwaymen, sailors and travelling pedlars, one of Salisbury’s hardest winters, an early patient at the new Infirmary, a local Jewish engraver, public hanging and gibbeting, and Jewish solidarity.
The winter of 1767-8 was particularly harsh, the coldest for thirty years. Then a thaw on 25 January 1768 revealed a grim discovery in a chalk pit on the Blandford Road out of Salisbury – a body partly buried in the snow. The body was recognised as a Jewish pedlar who walked into Salisbury with a box of trinkets shortly after Christmas. His name was Wolf Myers.
The discovery of Wolf Myers jogged people’s memory. A sailor named John Curtis had been admitted to Salisbury Infirmary with wounds which he said had been inflicted by a highwayman. He had been discharged from hospital and left rapidly on the coach to Portsmouth.
People remembered that Curtis had been carrying a distinctive box similar to that carried by pedlars and a warrant was sent to the magistrates in Portsmouth for his arrest. He was tracked to his ship berthed in Gosport, and taken into custody. His lodgings were searched and a box containing “wares such as the Jews normally carry” was discovered. A handbill was also found, identical to one in the dead man’s coat pocket, advertising the business of Jacob Cohen, a Jewish silverware dealer from Frome.
Curtis was brought back to Salisbury on 7 February 1768 and held in Fisherton Gaol awaiting trial at the Assizes. Abraham Woolf, founder of Portsmouth’s first synagogue, and a leading member of the Jewish community in Portsmouth, was keen to gain a conviction for the murder of one of the Jewish community. He endeavoured to secure witnesses for the trial and travelled to Salisbury himself to give testimony in support of the victim.
Curtis was convicted and was sentenced to be hanged, not in the usual place just outside the city at Fisherton, but on Harnham Hill, where Myers’ body was found. Moreover, his corpse was ordered afterwards to be ‘hung in chains’ in the same place on a pole 25 feet high.
Isaac Woolf ordered and paid for commemorative medals to be struck to mark Curtis’ execution and organised their distribution. He made a present of the medal to people who had been involved in apprehending and convicting the murderer. The engraver was Isaac Levy (or Levi), a Jewish silversmith in Salisbury. The medals were engraved by hand onto smoothed out bronze pennies.
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
The great bustard has a dignified slow walk but tends to run when disturbed, rather than fly.
The hen-bird on display at The Salisbury Museum was one of the last great bustards to be eaten in the town!