SO vicious was the attack that a farmhand feared his boss was dead.

Enraged Ben Smith had run up behind George Bridger and struck him more than once about the head with a stone hammer, his simmering anger towards the farmer eventually erupting.

Bridger, a Guardian of the Poor, had chaired a board meeting which refused Smith entry to the Poorhouse and had further incensed him with a remark about his father.

Smith's ire intensified when Bridger offered him work, picking up stones at 4d a load and breaking them at 3d a load, but then swiftly withdrew it when he turned up without a hammer.

"Do you have one that I could use?" he asked.

"No," replied Bridger, suggesting he should go to a neighbour to find work.

They went their separate ways but hours later Bridger saw Smith with his hammer and demanded to know he had obtained it.

Smith told him one of his farm employees had entrusted it to him.

"He should not have done so without orders," Bridger snapped. "Smith, you are going to cause us the parish a great deal of trouble as you father has done before you."

The farmer appeared then to relent and agreed to pay Smith for breaking up stones. "But you must bring the hammer home every night."

Bridger off walked but had not gone more than a few yards when Smith rushed up behind him and struck him on the head.

"I can remember no more," he was to tell jurors.

However the attack was witnessed by farm hand Bill Deer.

"I was trimming a hedge and saw Mr Bridger coming," he recalled. "Smith followed him into the field. I next saw my master lying on the ground. He was then 50 yards away from me. Smith was walking away with a hammer in his hand. He then went back to my master and hit him with the hammer again. He was lying on the ground insensible.

"Smith walked away but returned a third time when he threw the hammer at Mr Bridger. It struck a stone with such force the handle broke in two. Mr Bridger was lying on the ground bleeding from the side of his head and appeared to be dead.

A witness called Bill Purver revealed the animosity between the two men: "He said if he caught Bridger on his own by the common, he'd kill him, break his neck, or punish him, or one of it."

Police sergeant Samuel Everett arrested Smith.

"As I put on the handcuffs, he remarked they had staved him to death and he had been starving for the last two winters. I told him it would make things no better by killing a man.' He replied they he did not mean to kill him but intended he should remember it."

The witnesses' evidence was delivered at Hampshire Assizes in March 1851 when Smith was charged with maliciously striking Bridger upon the head with a hammer within intent to kill and murder him at his farm near Winchester.

The court was told that Bridger was unconscious for about an hour, and though a surgeon could not be sure if he had sustained a fractured skull, contended the wound he had suffered was of" a highly dangerous character."

Mr Edwards, who acted for Smith, admitted in his closing speech he could not disprove the facts but submitted the assault was not carried out as the terms of indictment had stated.

It was a point which the judge, Mr Justice Martin, stressed in his summing up.

"There is a distinction between an assault with intent to kill and murder, and assault with intent to commit grievously bodily harm.

The jury immediately convicted Smith on the lesser charge and he was sentenced to transportation abroad for life.