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: