Opening paragraphs.....................

From the hour of his birth, Tom Paine felt the deathly hand of the English state.  Some called him a child of state violence, for the thatched cottage where he came crying into the world in Thetford, England, in the winter of 1737, stood near an execution site, on the slopes of a low, windswept hill known locally as the Wilderness.  Townspeople favored this name because of its wretched soil and winter winds, but also because each year, with the arrival of spring, convicted criminals were herded through the area from the borough gaol, a quarter of a mile away, up to a nearby chalk ridge resembling Golgotha.  There, on Gallows Hill, within plain sight of Paine's cottage within the Wilderness, the gaol governors and town constable arranged hangings, watched by wide-eyed crowds.
-John Keane, Tom Paine:  A Political Life