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PALGRAVE HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE
CRIMINAL CORPSE AND ITS AFTERLIFE
Series Editors: Owen Davies · Elizabeth T. Hurren
Sarah Tarlow
THE
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Series Editors
Owen Davies
School of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire
Hateld, UK
Elizabeth T. Hurren
School of Historical Studies
University of Leicester
Leicester, UK
Sarah Tarlow
History and Archaeology
University of Leicester
Leicester, UK
Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse
and its Afterlife
This limited, nite series is based on the substantive outputs from a
major, multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust,
investigating the meanings, treatment, and uses of the criminal corpse
in Britain. It is a vehicle for methodological and substantive advances in
approaches to the wider history of the body. Focussing on the period
between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries as a cru-
cial period in the formation and transformation of beliefs about the body,
the series explores how the criminal body had a prominent presence in
popular culture as well as science, civic life and medico-legal activity. It is
historically signicant as the site of overlapping and sometimes contradic-
tory understandings between scientic anatomy, criminal justice, popular
medicine, and social geography.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14694
Sarah Tarlow
The Golden
and Ghoulish Age
of the Gibbet
in Britain
Sarah Tarlow
University of Leicester
Leicester, UK
Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife
ISBN 978-1-137-60088-2 ISBN 978-1-137-60089-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60089-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951552
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v
Acknowledgements
The book is based on research carried out as part of the research pro-
gramme “Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse”, funded by
the Wellcome Trust (grant WT095904AIA). I am very grateful to the
Wellcome Trust for their support and assistance—nancial and practical.
I also thank the other participants in the programme: Elizabeth Hurren,
Peter King, Richard Ward, Zoë Dyndor, Shane McCorristine, Owen
Davies, Francesca Matteoni, Floris Tomasini, Rachel Bennett and Emma
Battell Lowman. Many thanks to Emily Russell and Rowan Milligan at
Palgrave and to Steve Poole for his extremely helpful comments on the
rst version of this book. Thanks to Adam Barker for invaluable assistance
with the index. Most images are my own‚ unless otherwise specied.
vii
contents
1 Some Further Terror and Peculiar Mark of Infamy 1
2 How to Hang in Chains: How, Where and When
Eighteenth-Century Sheriffs Organised a Gibbeting 33
3 The Afterlife of the Gibbet 79
4 Conclusions: Why Gibbet Anyone? 101
Appendix 1: All Cases of Hanging in Chains 119
Appendix 2: Maps, 1752–1834 135
Concept Index 145
Historical Publications Index 147
Name Index 149
Place Index 153
ix
list of figures
Fig. 1.1 Number of gibbetings per decade in England and Wales,
1700–1832 28
Fig. 2.1 St Peter’s rock, Derbyshire, where Anthony Lingard
was hung in chains in 1815 41
Fig. 2.2 Felton’s obelisk in Portsmouth 42
Fig. 2.3 Road sign, Gibbet Hill Lane, Scrooby 47
Fig. 2.4 Interval in days between the rst day of the assizes
during which a criminal was convicted and the date
of his execution 63
Fig. 2.5 A Thames pirate 65
Fig. 2.6 Tull or Hawkins’s leg iron, courtesy of Reading Museums 66
Fig. 2.7 Some different styles of gibbet: a: John Breeds
(Rye, 1743, now in Rye town hall); b: John Keal
(Louth, 1731, now in Louth Museum); c: possibly
‘Jack the Painter’ (Portsmouth, 1777, now
in Winchester Museum); James Cook
(Leicester, 1832, replica now in Leicester Guildhall) 70
Fig. 2.8 Multiple punches holes on John Keal’s gibbet 71
Fig. 2.9 Headpiece of John Breeds’s gibbet with large skull
fragment remaining 71
Fig. 2.10 Artistic representation of a gibbet with carrion birds.
Vignette from Thomas Bewick’s British Birds (1804) 72
Fig. 3.1 ‘Willow biter’ and rhyme, drawn and recorded
in the commonplace book of Edwin Jarvis
of Doddington Hall, Lincs., courtesy of Claire Birch 88
xiii
list of tAbles
Table 1.1 Numbers hung in chains under the Murder Act 10
Table 1.2 Crimes punished by hanging in chains, 1752–1832 22
Table 2.1 The frequency of gibbetings by county and decade
through England and Wales 37
Table 2.2 Admiralty Court convictions resulting in hanging in chains 51
Table 2.3 Surviving gibbet cages 64
1
CHAPTER 1
Some Further Terror and Peculiar Mark
of Infamy
© The Author(s) 2017
S. Tarlow, The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain,
Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60089-9_1
Abstract The story of Tom Otter, a murderer who was executed and
gibbeted in 1806, has many striking features. Not least, this form of
brutal and bodily post-mortem punishment seems rather anachronis-
tic during a period often described in terms of increasing gentility and
humanity. It took place within the legal context of the Murder Act
(1752), which specied that the bodies of murderers had to be either
dissected or hung in chains. Other aggravated death penalties were
applied to those convicted of treason and suicide. A number of common
misconceptions about the gibbet need to be corrected.
Keywords Tom Otter · Murder act · Suicide · Treason · Post-mortem
punishment
tom otter
Tom Otter was not what he seemed. In fact, when he murdered his
second wife on their wedding day in 1805, he wasn’t even called Tom
Otter. A bigamist, a murderer, a corpse and a ghost, Tom Otter was as
unreliable as the numerous stories that were told about him from the
time of his arrest to the present day. These included the rumour that he
had murdered his baby (untrue: his wife was pregnant when he killed
her, but had not given birth), that somehow contrived to murder
2 S. TARLOW
another man after his own death by causing his gibbet cage to fall and
crush him (also untrue), and that every year on the anniversary of his
wife’s murder, his ghost would cause the hedge stake with which the
bloody deed was committed to appear, covered in gore, at the scene of
the crime (a great story, but based on a mid-nineteenth-century ction).
What we do know about Tom Otter is less sensational and more grim.
Thomas Otter was born in the Nottinghamshire village of Treswell in
1782 and married Martha Rawlinson there in 1804, the same year that
their daughter was christened at Hockerton. However, the very next
year, he found navvying work on the canals of Lincoln. He was at that
time calling himself Thomas Temporel, his mother’s maiden name and
the name under which he was soon to stand trial for murder. While in
Lincolnshire, he seems to have quickly forgotten his wife and child in
Treswell and taken up with a local girl called Mary Kirkham who, in due
course, also became pregnant. To avoid the problem of illegitimacy and
the need to support unmarried mothers and bastard children on par-
ish relief, Otter/Temporel was compelled to marry Mary Kirkham on
3 November 1805, when she was about eight months pregnant. The
South Hykeham parish register records that their marriage was witnessed
by William and John Shuttleworth, the Overseers of the Poor for that
parish. This is evidence that their wedding was a so-called “knobstick”
marriage—like a “shotgun wedding”, this was a forced union intended
to compel fathers to take responsibility for their own illegitimate chil-
dren. Instead of the bride’s angry father being the driving force, repre-
sentatives of the local parish who would have to provide for unsupported
women and children were the principal enforcers of knobstick unions.
But Tom and Mary’s marriage was very short-lived. Later that very
same day when the newly married couple were on their way back to
Doddington where he lived, Thomas attacked Mary with a hedge stake
and killed her at a place called Drinsey Nook.1
Tom was arrested the following day and brought to Lincoln castle.
Mary’s body was taken to the local inn (the Sun Inn in Saxilby) for post-
mortem examination. Her body was subsequently buried in the north-
east corner of Saxilby churchyard. Otter’s guilt was never really in doubt
and at his trial, during the March assizes of 1806, he was sentenced to
1
This history of Tom Otter is much indebted to the excellent work carried out by the
Saxilby and District History Group and published at http://www.saxilbyhistory.org/
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 3
death and dissection in accord with the 1752 Murder Act. Before the
judge left town, the post-mortem part of the sentence was changed to
hanging in chains.
Accordingly on March 14, Tom Otter was hanged at Lincoln gaol.
After his death, his body was encased in a gibbet cage for which he had
been measured before his execution—an experience upon which “all his
fortitude appeared to forsake him”.2 His body was then transported to
Saxilby and the gibbet cage was hung up on a pole thrity feet high on
Saxilby Moor, about 100 yards from the place where Mary’s body had
been found. A huge crowd gathered to see the body being hung on the
gibbet and for many days afterwards the scene was, according to an eye-
witness “just like a fair”.3 Another man remembered his father’s account:
“For several days after the event, the vicinity of the gibbet resembled a
country fair with drinking booths, ballad singers, Gypsy ddlers, and
fortune-tellers”.4
This was not, however, the end of Tom Otter’s story. Not only was his
gibbet thronged with visitors during the early days, it remained suspended
for more than forty years while his remains gradually decayed and fell
away. Only a violent storm in 1850 nally brought the gibbet cage down.
On that occasion, the lord of the manor, Edwin George Jarvis, recorded
in his notebook that he managed to acquire the headpiece, though “the
gypsies made off with nearly all the remains”,5 presumably for their value
as scrap metal. The headpiece is still kept at Doddington Hall, Jarvis’s
home and now home to his descendant, Claire Birch.
Given its prominence in the landscape and the memorable circum-
stances of its erection—one can be fairly sure that the murder of Mary
Kirkham and the subsequent execution and gibbeting of Tom Otter
must have been among the most dramatic and thrilling—if disturbing—
things that ever happened in Saxilby, it is not surprising that the gibbet
left enduring traces in the landscape. Though the exact location of the
gibbet is not marked, the road on which stands is called Tom Otter’s
2
The Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 21 March 1806.
3
This quotation, and much of the story, is taken from of Edwin George Jarvis’s unpub-
lished commonplace book, which is in the possession of Claire Birch of Doddington Hall,
Lincs.
4
George Hall (1900) The Gypsy’s Parson (London: Marston and Co), p. 17.
5
Commonplace book of Edwin Jarvis.
4 S. TARLOW
Lane, which leads to Tom Otter’s Bridge. Nearby are Gibbet Woods and
Gibbetwood Farm. Gibbet Lane cottages lie a little way to the southeast.
As well as writing his name and fate permanently into the landscape
around the scene of his crime, Tom Otter persists in some pieces of
local folklore. The rst concerns the malevolent spirit of Otter himself.
Legends—now perpetuated mostly on the internet—tell how the weight
of Otter’s gibbet cage was so great that it fell twice from its post, the
second time killing a man who had earlier taunted Otter. Then there is
the story of how every year, on the anniversary of Mary Kirkham’s mur-
der, the hedge stake with which Otter committed the deed was found to
be missing from the wall of the Peeweet (now Pyewipe) Inn and turned
up instead in the eld where she died, covered in blood. Even when a
group of men decided to stay up and keep watch, they all mysteriously
fell asleep at the same time and on waking found that the hedge stake
had gone to the eld once more. In the end, the story says, the hedge
stake could be stilled only when the Bishop of Lincoln burned it outside
the Cathedral. Another tale is that the Sun Inn, where Mary’s body was
brought for inquest, is haunted by the ghost cries of Tom Otter’s baby.
Interestingly, all of these tales can be traced to a story published in
the Lincoln Times in 1859 by Thomas Miller.6 The Lincolnshire Record
Ofce holds the covering letter that Miller wrote when sending his
Tom Otter story to the Lincoln Times, from which it is very clear that
the story is meant to be ction, with only a small core of historical fact.
Nevertheless, the ghosts of Drinsey Nook are a regular xture in the
investigations of paranormal interest groups and Lincolnshire ghost tours.
post-mortem punishment
Tom Otter’s tale has many commonalities with the later parts of other
criminal histories of the long eighteenth century. For the historian or
archaeologist, it also raises a number of interesting questions. What were
the purpose and meaning of the rather repulsive practice of hanging in
chains? What did it actually entail? What effect did it have on the crimi-
nal, on the justice system and on the huge crowds who witnessed the
event and the even larger numbers who eagerly consumed journalistic or
6
Maureen James 2011. http://tellinghistory.co.uk/content/additional-information-
not-included-lincolnshire-folk-tales-maureen-james-published-history.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 5
ctional accounts of gibbets and their inhabitants? What kind of men-
tal and physical legacy was left by the gibbets which formerly stood by
roadsides and on commons all over England? This short volume picks
up where most crime historians leave off, when the lifeless (or apparently
lifeless) body is hanging from the execution scaffold, and follows the
corpse into its gibbet irons where it might remain for many decades. This
exploration makes use of archaeological, landscape, folkloric and literary
evidence where relevant, but most of its data comes from historical news-
paper and archival sources. In particular, it makes use of the invaluable
“sheriffs’ cravings”, which are the expense claims submitted by county
sheriffs, usefully detailing the practical elements of carrying out sen-
tences, now stored in the National Archives at Kew.
Principally we are concerned here with the period from the Murder
Act of the mid-eighteenth century to 1832, when the last gibbeting took
place. Most examples are English and although I will be drawing in occa-
sional examples from the other countries of the British Isles, there is no
attempt to look at the global history of hanging in chains. This chap-
ter looks at the legal background to the punishment and briey consid-
ers other forms of post-mortem punishment before asking the question,
“Who was hung in chains, and what were the circumstances that made
hanging in chains, rather than another means of post-mortem punish-
ment, the appropriate choice?”
hAnging in chAins before the murder Act
Hanging in chains predates the 1752 Murder Act and was a widely used
punishment in the earlier eighteenth century and the seventeenth cen-
tury. The same is also true of dissection, both punishments being part
of the discretionary repertoire of the judge. However, the genealogies
of the two treatments are different. The use of criminal corpses for ana-
tomical dissection was driven principally by the needs of the anatomists.
As Richardson has discussed, the earliest regular supply of cadavers for
dissection was the result of legislation in the time of Henry VIII speci-
fying that the bodies of four executed felons be supplied to the Barber
Surgeons each year. By contrast, hanging in chains is a punishment more
related to the bloodthirsty retributive punishments of the late medieval
and early modern periods. The display of bodies—or more often of body
parts, especially the head—was a common element of punishment for
serious crimes such as murder or treason before the eighteenth century
6 S. TARLOW
and was carried out in England as part of the sentence for treason as late
as 1745–1746 after the Jacobite rebellion.7 The display of body parts in
the medieval and early modern periods was particularly associated with
crimes against the State or the political order. Body parts were typically
displayed above city walls and gates or on prominent public buildings.
The particular geographical specicity of hanging in chains as a post-exe-
cution punishment which is tied to the scene of crime was an effective
way of perpetuating the memory of an atrocity. This goes some way to
explaining its popularity in the punishment of aggravated highway rob-
bery, and the tradition of hanging in chains those who have committed
murder on the highway seems to have been established during the seven-
teenth century. Thomas Randall was punished this way for murder and
robbery on the highway in 1696 and added to his spectacular death by
dressing all in white for his execution.8
the murder Act
Tom Otter’s sentence for murder was not only execution—which was
well established as the usual punishment for such a crime—but also the
stipulation that after death his body was to be “hung in chains”. In the
early nineteenth century, the sentencing of Otter’s crime was determined
by the Murder Act. The 1751 act (which came into force in 1752 and so
is often attributed to that year) was called “An Act for Better Preventing
the Horrid Crime of Murder” and was known generally as the Murder
Act. It was largely superseded by the Anatomy Act of 1832 and was for-
mally abolished in 1834.
The punishment for murder in the middle of the eighteenth century,
as it had been for many centuries before, was death. However, by that
time, the number of crimes for which the penalty was death was more
than 2209, compared with around 50 capital offences in 1688.10 When
7
V.A.C. Gatrell (1994) The Hanging Tree: execution and the English people 1770–1868
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 317.
8
Post Man and the Historical Account, 114, 30 January 1696.
9
D. Levinson (2002) Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, vol. 1 (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage), p. 153.
10
H. Potter (1993) Hanging in judgement: religion and the death penalty in England
from the bloody code to abolition (Ann Arbor: SMC Publishing), p. 4.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 7
you could, in theory, be hanged for poaching rabbits or going out after
dark with a blackened face, the issue of distinguishing the most serious
crimes became a problem.11 Peter King has studied the extensive eight-
eenth-century public debate about what would constitute an appropriate
and effective punitive response to serious and violent crime. Suggestions
included ways of exacerbating the pain of execution through, for exam-
ple, breaking on a wheel, as was widely practised elsewhere in Europe,
or torturing to death. Some commentators advocated the use of some
kind of lex talionis, which follows the principle that punishment should
mimic whatever was inicted on the victim of a crime. Thus, murder
by drowning would be punished by drowning the perpetrator; serious
assaults might be punished by inicting a similar wound on the crimi-
nal before his or her execution.12 Alternatively, the punishment of exe-
cution could be augmented by spreading the subject of punishment to
include the criminal’s family. Finally, the punishment might be extended
past the point of death by causing an element of post-execution vio-
lence or humiliation to be enacted on the dead body of the criminal.
In the case of suicides, men who had escaped the dock before death
were subject to all those forms of post-mortem punishment.13 A long
period of debate about exacerbated forms of punishment preceded the
introduction of the 1752 bill, and indeed the extension of post-execu-
tion punishment to crimes other than murder continued to be advo-
cated during the later eighteenth century. In particular, serious attempts
11 In fact, as historians have shown, during the period of the so-called “Bloody
Code”, the discretion of the judges and the reluctance of the juries meant that discre-
tionary death sentences for property crime were often avoided or reprieved. This has
led King and Ward to suggest that the long eighteenth century in England was in fact
the period of the Unbloody Code. See P. King (2000) Crime, justice and discretion in
England 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); P. King and R. Ward (2016)
‘Rethinking the Bloody Code in Eighteenth-Centre Britain: Capital Punishment at
the Centre and on the Periphery’ Past and Present (2016); J. Beattie (1986) Crime
and the Courts in England 1600–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
12
Peter King (forthcoming) Punishing the Criminal Corpse 1700–1840: aggravated forms
of the death penalty in England (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
13 Rab Houston (2011) Punishing the Dead: suicide, lordship and community in
Britain 1500–1830. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 203; Robert Halliday
(1997) ‘Criminal graves and rural crossroads’ British Archaeology 25 (June 1997);
M. MacDonald and T. Murphy (1990) Sleepless souls: suicide in early modern England
(Oxford: Clarendon Press).
8 S. TARLOW
were made in the 1780s and 1790s to extend mandatory post-execution
punishment to other capital crimes, including burglary, highway robbery
and some other crimes.14
Both dissection and hanging in chains were part of the customary
repertoire of sentences that a judge might specify for serious crimes, but
their use had been, before the Murder Act, discretionary. There was no
legislation or even guidelines about the appropriate use of post-mortem
punishment. Post-mortem punishment seems to have been considered
by the legislative and judicial Establishment as both a deterrent and an
expression of social sanction, even of collective retribution. Peter King
has suggested that simple vengefulness might also have played a larger
part than is sometimes assumed.
The Murder Act specied that
[W]hereas the horrid Crime of Murder has of late been more frequently
perpetrated than formerly… And whereas it is thereby become necessary
that some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy be added to the
Punishment of Death, now by Law inicted on such as shall be guilty of
the said heinous Offence;… Sentence shall be pronounced in open Court,
immediately after the Conviction of such Murderer… in which Sentence
shall be expressed, not only the usual Judgment of Death, but also the
Time appointed for the Execution thereof, and the Marks of Infamy
hereby directed for such Offenders, in order to impress a just Horror in
the Mind of such Offender, and on the Minds of such as shall be present,
of the heinous Crime of Murder.
And after Sentence is pronounced, it shall be in the Power of any such
Judge, or Justice, to appoint the Body of any such Criminal to be hung in
Chains; but that in no Case whatsoever, the Body of any Murderer shall be
suffered to be buried, unless after such Body shall have been dissected and
anatomized.15
In practice, this usually meant that a judge sentencing a murderer would
specify that, following execution, the criminal’s body be sent to the
15
25 Geo II c. 37. An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder.
14
Richard Ward (2014) ‘The Criminal Corpse, Anatomists and the Criminal Law:
Parliamentary Attempts to Extend the Dissection of Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century
England’, Journal of British Studies, 53: 4.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 9
appointed surgeon or anatomist for dissection, or hung in chains. The
wording of the Murder Act itself is a little unclear about whether the
sentence had to be anatomisation, with the proviso that such a sentence
could later be modied to hanging in chains, or whether the judge was
empowered at the point of sentencing to specify hanging in chains. At a
meeting held on 7 May 1752 for the purpose of resolving any ambiguity,
a number of judges argued that hanging in chains should be specied if
no surgeon could be found to dissect the body.16 An initial sentence of
dissection was sometimes later changed to hanging in chains at the end
of the Session in which the case was tried.
So it was under this legislation that Tom Otter’s shocking crime
was dealt with. Although the majority of those condemned under the
Murder Act in the period between the Murder Act and the Anatomy
Act were sentenced to dissection, in a minority of cases the judge speci-
ed that the felon be gibbeted, or as it was generally described at the
time “hung in chains”. Of the 1150 convictions under the Murder Act
in England and Wales between 1752 and 1832, 908 (79%) were anato-
mised and dissected after execution, and 147 (13%) hung in chains. Of
the rest, 93 (8%) were pardoned, and two died in prison before the sen-
tence was carried out (Table 1.1 and Appendix y).
other post-mortem punishments: from customAry
sAnction to the full force of the lAw
Dissection and gibbeting were not the only ways in which social sanc-
tion was physically expressed through actions on the dead body. Without
any recourse to law, there were mechanisms within the local moral econ-
omy by which the status of the deceased could be signalled and repro-
duced. The purity of unmarried girls, and sometimes boys too, was
acknowledged by burying them with a “maiden’s crant” or decorative
crown.17 The location of the grave was also to some extent indexical of
social standing. Disapprobation could be expressed through denial of a
16
Judges’ resolution on the Manner of Sentencing under the Murder Act—National
Army Museum Archives, ref. 6510–146(2), 7 May 1752.
17
Rosie Morris (2013) ‘Maiden’s garlands: a funeral custom of post-Reformation
England’, in C. King and D. Sayer (eds.) The archaeology of post-medieval religion
(Woodbridge: Boydell).
10 S. TARLOW
grave space in the desirable areas of the churchyard. The unfashionable
north side of the churchyard was the customary burial place of non-com-
municants, unbaptised babies, strangers and criminals. In some parts of
Britain, special burial grounds were kept for the disposal of unbaptised
children, foreigners, suicides and criminals, although this practice was
not widespread outside Ireland and the northwest of Scotland.18 Though
never formalised in law, burial outside the churchyard or in less prestig-
ious parts of the churchyard was part of the moral economy of the com-
munity until the twentieth century.
There were, however, four other kinds of prosecution beside murder
that could result in some form of post-mortem punishment: high trea-
son; petty treason; piracy and other crimes on the high seas (these were
tried by the Admiralty courts); and the most serious property offences,
principally highway robbery and robbery of the mail. Post-mortem treat-
ments of those executed for major property crime, when that sentence
was passed, were similar to post-mortem treatments of those executed
for murder. Capital criminals convicted by the Admiralty courts also
faced punishments similar to those convicted of murder, with the nota-
ble feature that they were more likely to be gibbeted and that Admiralty
gibbetings had some differences in practice to those convicted in assize
courts. High and petty treason, however, were punishable during the
Table 1.1 Numbers hung in chains under the Murder Act
Period Hung in chains
under
the Murder Act
Hung in chains for
other crimes
Total hung
in chains
Hung in chains
in each period as
percentage of total,
1752–1826 (%)
1752–1776 62 28 90 41
1777–1801 67 48 115 53
1802–1826 12 2 14 6
Total 141 78 219 100
18
E. Murphy (2008) ‘Parenting, child loss and the cilline of post-medieval Ireland’,
in M Lally (ed.) (Re)Thinking the little ancestor: new perspectives on the archaeology of
infancy and childhood (Oxford: Archaeopress); S. Tarlow (2011) Ritual, belief and the
dead in early modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.
45–52; M. McCabe (2010) ‘Through the backdoor to salvation: infant burial grounds in
the early modern Gaidhealtachd’. Paper presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of the
Theoretical Archaeology Group, University of Bristol, 17–19 December 2010.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 11
long eighteenth century by various kinds of aggravated execution which
involved subjecting the body to additional elements of pain and indig-
nity both during and after execution.19 These post-mortem punishments
might more aptly be considered aggravated executions and indeed as the
period progressed, some elements of punishment which had previously
been carried out on the living body as part of the process of execution
were later visited on the newly dead body instead. In addition to these,
the crime of suicide—which could not be prosecuted or tried for obvious
reasons—was frequently punished by visiting extra humiliations on the
dead body.
Crimes Other Than Murder: Treason
Those convicted of treasonable offences were customarily subject to par-
ticularly excruciating and slow forms of death. It is widely believed that
in Britain treason is still punishable by death. In fact, the death penalty
even for treason was abolished in 1998, and no person has been executed
for treason in this country since 1946. However, capital punishment
remained, in theory, mandatory for high treason even after the death
penalty had been abolished for most other offences, evidencing the par-
ticular gravity of treason in British law.
Treason offences were divided into high treason, which is treachery
against the State or monarch, and petty treason: treachery of a subor-
dinate against their natural or social superior, which would include the
murder of an employer by their servant, for example, or of a husband
by his wife. It was decided soon after the Murder Act that petty treason
came within the purview of the Murder Act, although until the Treason
Act of 1791 the traditional means of execution for women convicted of
that offence—burning—was used as late as 1788.20 However, traitors
were also subject to special treatments of the body.
Well into the nineteenth century, the ofcial legal punishment for
male traitors was to be “hung, drawn and quartered”, which involved
removing the traitor’s body from the scaffold before he was dead and
cutting out his entrails before his own eyes. Finally, he was beheaded
19
Peter King (forthcoming) Punishing the Criminal Corpse.
20
Margaret Sullivan was burned for petty treason in 1788. Gatrell The Hanging Tree,
pp. 337–38.
12 S. TARLOW
and his body divided into quarters, which could be displayed in a pub-
lic place. For women, including those found guilty of petty treason, the
legal execution for treason was by burning at the stake. However, by the
eighteenth century, it had become normal practice to kill traitors rst by
hanging (for men) or strangling (for women), so that then being burned
or disembowelled became a post-execution punishment.21
The traditional fate of the traitor’s body was for his quarters to be dis-
posed “At the King’s pleasure”. Until the eighteenth century, this gener-
ally meant displaying the heads of traitors at city gates or on prominent
public buildings. Other body parts, being less recognisable, were less fre-
quently displayed.
During the period of the Murder Act, the display of traitors’ heads
and quarters was denitely less common in Britain than it had been in
the early modern period, and the times and places where it was in more
frequent use—Ireland through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and Scotland in the wake of the 1745 rebellion—were those
where the sovereignty of the monarch and the rule of Parliament were
most seriously threatened.22 Following the Jacobite rebellion, there were
79 executions for treason in 1746, in London, York, Carlisle, Brampton
and Penrith. Although as traitors their bodies could be decapitated, quar-
tered and displayed, letters at the time show that at least some of those
executed in Cumberland were immediately buried.23 However, 18 of
those considered most culpable were brought to London for trial and
execution, and their fates are better recorded. Their bodies were hanged,
drawn and quartered and then beheaded. Although the bodies appear to
have been buried afterwards, at least some of the heads were retained and
displayed. Francis Towneley’s body, for example, was buried in St Pancras
churchyard, but his head was placed on a spike at Temple Bar, next to
that of fellow Jacobites George Fletcher and Thomas David Morgan. The
head of Thomas Deacon, who was executed the same day, was pickled and
21
Beattie Crime and the Courts, p. 451.
22
J. Kelly (2015) ‘Punishing the dead: execution and the executed body in eighteenth-
century Ireland’, in R. Ward (ed.) A Global Gistory of Execution and the Criminal Corpse
(Basingstoke: Palgrave); Rachel Bennett (2015) Capital Punishment and the Criminal
Corpse in Scotland 1740 to 1834, Unpublished Ph.D., University of Leicester.
23
Bennett, Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 13
transported to Manchester and Carlisle to be exhibited. Exhibited heads
were sometimes rescued: Towneley’s head was recovered from Temple
Bar and interred in the family vault at Towneley Hall in Burnley.
In practice, after the executions of the Jacobite rebels of 1745, there
were only two instances of disembowelling as a formal punishment for
treason—those of Francis Henry La Motte in 1781 and David Tyrie in
1782. Although the sentence pronounced continued to condemn the
prisoner to be “hanged by the neck but not until you are dead, but that
you be taken down again, and that while you are yet alive, your bowels
be taken out and burnt before your faces, and that your bodies be divided
each into four quarters, and your heads and quarters be at the King’s dis-
posal”, in practice the executioner had discretion to waive the disembowel-
ling and quartering and to abbreviate other elements. Even La Motte had
hanged for nearly an hour before he was disembowelled, so he would have
been deeply unconscious, if not dead, by the time that part of his sentence
was carried out. Thus, by the late eighteenth century, burning, disembow-
elling and so on had become effectively post-execution punishments.
Executed in Hampshire in 1782, David Tyrie might have been the
last person to be given the full works. Tyrie was convicted of carrying on
a treasonous correspondence with the French and had some association
with De La Motte, executed the previous year. The Hampshire Chronicle
reported on 31 August of that year, “His head was severed from his body,
his heart taken out and burnt, his privities cut off, and his body quartered.
He was then put into a cofn, and buried among the pebbles by the sea-
side; but no sooner had the ofcers retired, but the sailors dug up the cof-
n, took out the body, and cut it in a thousand pieces, every one carrying
away a piece of his body to shew their messmates on board”. Interestingly,
although Tyrie was given the whole medieval gory horror, his head and
quarters were not piked and displayed but buried on the shore, a treatment
normally accorded to suicides and strangers. De la Motte’s treatment was
slightly more lenient: his body was only symbolically scored rather than fully
quartered. His body was placed immediately in a cofn by an undertaker,
but the head was “reserved by the executioner to be publicly exposed”.24
24
J. Williams (1781) The life and trial of F.H. de la Motte, a French spy, for high trea-
son (London: T. Truman), p. 34. The Newgate Calendar, however, says that the head was
placed with the body in the cofn.
14 S. TARLOW
James O’Coigley, executed in Kent in 1798 for high treason, was
beheaded after death, although this was carried out by a surgeon rather
than the executioner. Both head and body were immediately put into a
cofn and buried.
The old sentences were enacted only a few times in the nineteenth
century. The Despard conspirators were decapitated in 1803, though
not disembowelled or quartered, and their heads do not seem to have
been retained for display after being shown to the crowd.25 In 1812, two
men—John Smith and William Cundell—were hanged and beheaded for
treason, following their desertion from the British to the French army.
Their heads were shown to the crowd but then returned with their
bodies to their friends for burial.26 The leaders of the Pentrich revolt
were executed in 1817. They were sentenced to be hanged drawn and
quartered, although in the event quartering was waived. After they
were dead, they were beheaded and then “buried in one grave in St
Werburgh’s churchyard”.27 Finally, in 1820, the Cato Street conspirators
were hanged and then beheaded28 by a surgeon. Three other would-be
Scottish rebels were executed at Glasgow and Stirling later the same year;
there were no further judicial beheadings in Britain.
The bodies—and heads—of the Cato Street conspirators were not
exhibited, nor were they returned to the men’s families, who had peti-
tioned to be allowed to claim them. Instead, they were buried within the
prison compound, covered in quicklime. The wives’ petitions were not
purely sentimental or dutiful; according to Gatrell, they proposed to
exhibit the bodies commercially to raise money for the conspirators’ fami-
lies.29 By the time of the Cato Street executions, therefore, the exhibition
25
C. Oman (1922) ‘The Unfortunate Colonel Despard’ in The Unfortunate Colonel
Despard and other studies (London: E. Arnold), pp. 21–22.
26
The Criminal recorder: or, Biographical sketches of notorious public characters, including
murderers, traitors, pirates, mutineers, incendiaries … and other noted persons who have suf-
fered the sentence of the law for criminal offenses ; embracing a variety of curious and singular
cases, anecdotes, &c, Vol. 2 (London: J. Cundee, 1815), pp. 288–96.
27
P. Taylor (1989) May the Lord have mercy on your soul: murder and serious crime in
Derbyshire 1732–1882 (Derby: JH Hall and sons), pp. 37–39.
28
The execution of the Despard conspirators and the Cato Street conspirators is exten-
sively described and discussed by Gatrell in The Hanging Tree, pp. 298–321.
29
Gatrell The Hanging Tree, p. 308.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 15
of the heads or the bodies of traitors was not carried out, either for pri-
vate prot or for public statement.
Interestingly, the only criminals to stand trial posthumously in the
post-medieval period were charged with treason. In England, Oliver
Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were tried posthumously
for treason in 1661 and, on being found guilty, were exhumed and pun-
ished by hanging, beheading and the display of their heads. The remains
of Robert Leslie, accused of treason in the Scottish courts in 1540, were
allegedly exhumed before the trial, and his bones were brought to the
dock, but no similar case happened in England.30
The punishment of traitors’ bodies can be mostly tted to a broad
tripartite chronological division: rst is the medieval and early modern
tradition of aggravated execution with extreme pain and, essentially, tor-
ture. This was part of a broad European tradition of spectacular pain,
famously exemplied in Foucault’s description of the death of Damiens
the regicide in 1757.31 This was succeeded in the eighteenth century by
a period during which execution by, effectively, public torture gave way
to a public execution which reserved the spectacular elements of burn-
ing, dismemberment and public display to the treatment of the post-
mortem body.32 Indignity and disintegration of the body (psychological
and social distress) thus supplanted pain (physical distress) as the most
severe punishment. Finally, over the course of the later eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, public humiliation of the body was succeeded by
private and increasingly efcient, physical punishment. The disposition
of quarters and display of heads ended, and the practices of gibbeting,
30
The case of Robert Leslie was cited in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1904 and is
repeated in a number of twentieth-century sources without attribution. Court records of
December 1540 seem to suggest only that Leslie’s wife and children were summoned to
appear in his stead. S. Tarlow (2013) ‘Cromwell and Plunkett: two early modern heads
called Oliver’, in J. Kelly and M. Lyones (eds.) Death and dying in Ireland, Britain and
Europe: historical perspectives (Dublin: Irish Academic Press), pp. 59–76.
31
Michel Foucault (1991) [orig. Paris: Gallimard, 1975] Discipline and Punish
(London: Penguin).
32
A further twist is that the body removed from the gallows following a strangula-
tion hanging was often still alive though unconscious. The frequency with which hanged
‘dead’ bodies revived on the dissection table testies to the inexactitude of pre–long-drop
hanging. See E. Hurren (2013) ‘The dangerous dead: dissecting the criminal corpse’ The
Lancet, 27 July 2013, Vol. 382, pp. 302–03.
16 S. TARLOW
public dissection and eventually public execution of any kind were gradu-
ally abandoned between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centu-
ries. Even traitors were thenceforward executed privately by the quick
and efcient long-drop method, and their bodies buried within prison
walls.
This kind of chronology of punishment is observed in not only the
case of treasonous bodies but also other kinds of criminal. The changes
are to do with cultural attitudes as well as the law.
That the disembowelling and beheading of traitors feels anachronis-
tic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not a new point. It is
both in the spectacular pain of prolonged, multi-stage executions and
in the superuity of post-mortem shaming of the body that the traitor’s
death claims a medieval descent. Yet the extensive, irrational, spectacular
punishment of the body was also the core of the post-mortem punish-
ments of the 1752 Murder Act. King’s review of the published debate
about aggravated forms of capital and corporal punishment demonstrates
that, although executions and publically bloody punishments declined in
number during the eighteenth century, they actually increased in brutal-
ity up until the 1770s. For King, the Murder Act is not an aberration but
the culmination of a series of debates. This presents a different kind of
eighteenth century, one that is very different from Norbert Elias’s civi-
lising journey, and challenges progressivist histories that emphasise the
spread of humane and empathetic attitudes.33
Crimes Other Than Murder: Suicide
Post-mortem treatment of the body could be used as a means of express-
ing social sanction for a range of deviant behaviours, including crimi-
nality, even without being formalised in law. This is most notable in the
treatment of suicide bodies. The practice of giving special burial treat-
ment to suicides was well established in Britain since at least the medieval
period. In early modernity, under the inuence of puritanical and funda-
mentalist Protestantism, suicide was considered to be evidence of the sin
33
Norbert Elias (1994) The civilising process. Oxford: Blackwell. Elias offers a long-term
history of manners by which self-restraint, circumspection and ‘civility’ came to characterise
social and political relationships over the second millennium AD.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 17
of despair and almost invariably thought to be the result of succumbing
to diabolical temptation. By the end of the eighteenth century, however,
ordinary people throughout Europe were far more likely to want to see
suicide as the result of mental illness and to try to circumvent traditional,
religious or legal requirements that suicides be denied normal burial.34
However, attitudes towards taking one’s own life show considerable vari-
ation even in the eighteenth century and were affected by the circum-
stances of the suicide.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suicide was con-
sidered a crime under both secular and canon law. Those who committed
suicide in order to escape the justice of the State were double criminals.
Since the means of death had been taken from the State, other forms of
punishment were placed upon the suicide, foremost among which were
post-mortem punishment of the body and forfeiture of the Estate. As
Houston notes, forfeiture was “a token of blame and of ‘apology’”, but
the punishment of the body was both more shameful and more puni-
tive.35 MacDonald and Murphy’s history of suicide records that the
normal punishment for suicides until 1823 was forfeiture and profane
burial. The 1823 Act ended the custom of profane burial for suicides,
but it is noteworthy that profane burial was never a universal and legally
enshrined rule: the 1823 act only put a stop to a local customary practice
which had already fallen out of use in many parts of the country, as a
more sympathetic attitude to suicides gained ground. In fact, Houston
contends that profane burial in the form of highway burial with a stake
through the body was predominantly a southeast English custom and
that widely variable practices are described in provincial newspaper and
legal accounts of the disposal of the suicide’s body. Houston notes, for
example, that in 50 years of the Cumberland Pacquet only 3 of 18 sui-
cides reported in the northern counties of England were linked to unu-
sual burials: one staked at a crossroads, one on Lancaster Moor and one
buried at Low Water mark. All three are from 1790–1791 and might
34
MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls. See also the essays in Jeffrey Watt (ed.) (2004)
From Sin to Insanity (Ithaca: Cornell).
35
The history of suicide in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been
most comprehensively addressed by MacDonald and Murphy Sleepless Souls (1999) and Rab
Houston Punishing the dead (2010). The literature on the legal, theological and social con-
text of suicide in history is vast and complex; here we concentrate only on the fate of the
body.
18 S. TARLOW
reect a particular moment of public anxiety about self-murder. Two
more staked burials of suicides from other counties were mentioned in
the Paquet, and a few more mention unusual locations, but of a total of
209 reported suicides nothing is mentioned of the disposal of the body
in the majority of cases.36
The prevalence of staked highway burial is hard to estimate. Historical
sources have not been systematically reviewed for much of the coun-
try and are in any case not always informative. Even where a coroner’s
court recommended staked highway burial, actual practice is not often
attested: to our knowledge, there is no coroner’s court equivalent of the
sheriffs’ cravings that detail actual expenditure. Archaeological evidence
is an excellent source but very few suicide burials are known. In particu-
lar, highway burials, by virtue of their very exclusion from normal burial
places, are not generally anticipated when road development schemes are
carried out, and it is likely that many or most have been destroyed in
twentieth-century road construction programmes without any kind of
archaeological excavation or recording having taken place. The skeletons
of bodies buried without cofns rarely survive for two hundred years
except as fragments and stains,37 and if such remains were excavated
without archaeological training or using archaeological methods, they
would be very unlikely to be noted or recorded. Halliday’s short article
on criminal graves has little sense of chronology and does not distinguish
suicides from other executed criminals.38 It is interesting, however, that
nearly all the cases of crossroads burial he mentions are from the south
and east of England. The one Welsh case discussed—reported in the
Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784—was buried on the shore, disregarding
the coroner’s suggestion that she be given staked crossroads burial.
The desecration of suicides’ bodies and the enactment of practices
designed to appease the spirit or lay the ghost of a suicide were not ordered
or sanctioned by the Church of England‚ although religious authorities did
insist from time to time that suicides not be given full and normal burial
rites.39 Nor, as we have seen, did English law insist on their special treatment.
36
Rab Houston, Punishing the Dead, p. 203.
37
Sian Anthony (2015) ‘Hiding the body: ordering space and allowing manipulation of
body parts within modern cemeteries’, in S. Tarlow (ed.) The archaeology of death in post-
medieval Europe (Berlin: DeGryuter Open), pp. 172–90.
38
Halliday, ‘Criminal graves and rural crossroads’.
39
MacDonald and Murphy Sleepless souls, pp. 42–43.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 19
Houston’s contention is that suicide burial customs were regionally
and chronologically variable and indeed were not necessarily standard
even within a small area. So the degree of “profanity” in a profane bur-
ial might be quite varied. Since practice was not specied authoritatively
by Church or State, suicide burial might serve a number of purposes.
Briey, these could include the following:
1. Punitive practice as part of the retributive process. To express social
sanction
2. Deterrence. In Weever’s often-cited words “to terrie all passen-
gers, by that so infamous and reproachfull a buriall, not to make
such their nall passage out of this world”40
3. Preventing the ghost of the suicide from returning to trouble the
living, through pinning (with a staked burial) or burial at a cross-
roads (which, it has been suggested, would confuse and disorien-
tate the revenant)
4. Exclusion from the community of the dead. This was enacted spir-
itually in the exclusion of suicides form normal rites and normative
daytime burials and spatially in keeping the place of suicide burial
separate from the normative cemetery. They were buried either
outside the churchyard or on its inauspicious north side.
Until the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961, all suicides except those
who were insane were criminals.41 But some suicides were criminals twice
over. Those men and women who evaded the noose, gaol, transport or
other public retribution by taking their own lives were a special—and,
it was often opined, particularly culpable—kind of suicide. The most
famous criminal suicide of our period was the death of John Williams in
Coldbath Prison, London, in 1811, while he was awaiting trial for the
Ratcliffe Highway murders (although some doubt has been raised about
whether Williams’s death was indeed a suicide).42
40
John Weever (1631), Ancient and Funerall Monuments with in the united Monarchie of
Great Britaine, Ireland and the Islands adjacent (London: Thomas Harper), p. 22.
41
Suicide Act 1961 (9 & 10 Eliz 2 c 60).
42
Thanks to Steve Poole for drawing my attention to the possibility that Williams did not
take his own life.
20 S. TARLOW
John Williams’s burial was pure pageant. His body was taken from
the prison where he died, laid out on a board next to the blood-stained
tools with which he had murdered his victims. The board was put into a
cart and followed by a crowd of up to 20,000 people through the streets
of London. The route taken by the wagon passed the houses of his vic-
tims, at each of which the procession halted. Eventually, the procession
reached the Cannon Street crossroads, where the body was stuffed into a
grave that was slightly too small and a stake driven through it.43
thinking About gibbets: the historiogrAphy of hAnging
in chAins
“On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black
things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of
these was the beacon by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped
cask upon a pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gib-
bet with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate”.44
Hanging in chains, then, was only one way among several of express-
ing social or judicial censure after death, and it occurred more rarely than
staked burial or dissection. However, gibbetings left a cultural mark in
the minds and landscapes of those who witnessed one, that was perhaps
disproportionate to their frequency.
Given the emotional impact of the real or imagined presence of the
gibbet (young Pip’s awareness of the pirate’s gibbet on the marsh in the
rst chapter of Great Expectations, for example), there is surprisingly lit-
tle sustained or academic study of the practice. This contrasts with the
large body of literature on dissection as a post-mortem punishment.45
The two most extensive and detailed studies of the practice, William
Andrews Bygone Punishments (1899) and especially Albert Hartshorne’s
Hanging in Chains (1893), are both more than a hundred years old,
43
Newgate Calendar (http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ngintro.htm).
44
Charles Dickens (1996 [1860–61]), Great Expectations (London: Penguin), p. 7.
45
See Ruth Richardson (1989) Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul); Elizabeth Hurren (2012) Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy
and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834–1929 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Thomas
Laqueur (1989) ‘Crowds, Carnival, and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868’, in
Lee Beier, David Cannadine, and James Rosenheim (eds.) The First Modern Society: essays in
honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 21
and neither makes any attempt to be exhaustive or systematic or to put
the practice into much historical context.46 Hanging in chains is often
mentioned by crime historians as a sentence, but the technicalities of the
physical process, the criteria by which gibbets were located in the land-
scape, and the material impact of their presence have not been subject to
analysis, nor have the contrasts between gibbeting and dissection been
discussed or explained. This book attempts to draw out the main features
of gibbeting, principally during the period of the Murder Act. This chap-
ter reviews the broad historical context of gibbeting under the Murder
Act: how frequent was the practice and how did it change over time?
What kinds of crime or criminal were most likely to be punished in that
way? It also corrects some widespread misunderstandings about hanging
in chains. The second chapter is concerned with questions of geography
and the events of a gibbeting itself: where were gibbets sited? Which
parts of the country were keenest on the practice? How were the precise
locations of gibbets determined? What actually happened when a person
was hung in chains? What were the technical and material features of the
apparatus? The third chapter takes us beyond the original occasion of the
gibbeting to look at the afterlives of gibbets—how did they shape the
landscape and people’s experience long-term? When and why were they
taken down and what happened to the remains and the material then?
The book ends with some consideration of why this punishment, which
seems in some ways anachronistically brutal in the later eighteenth cen-
tury and certainly was more costly than its alternative (dissection), con-
tinued to be carried out.
who wAs hung in chAins?
Although the Murder Act dealt specically with murder, gibbeting and
dissection were sometimes specied for other crimes too. Next to mur-
derers, the most likely to be hung in chains were those who came before
the Admiralty courts (mostly for killing offences, piracy or smuggling),
highway robbers and those convicted of robbing the mail (Table 1.2).
The practice of hanging highway robbers in chains near the scene of
46
W. Andrews (1899) Bygone Punishments (London: William Andrews and Co); Albert
Hartshorne (1893), Hanging in Chains (Cassell, New York).
22 S. TARLOW
their crime was apparently well established by the time of the Murder
Act. As early as 1694, a proposal to formalise the practice had been put
to Parliament, and Cockburn has found evidence that by 1770 it was
normal for a Post Ofce ofcial to attend the trial of a mail robber to
remind the judge that hanging in chains was the customary sentence in
such cases, or to pressure the Secretary of State to order that punishment
if the judge was not willing to be guided.47 Harper says that as a result
of intervention by the Earl of Leicester, Postmaster General at the time,
after 1753 those found guilty of robbing the mail were to be gibbeted
after execution.48 However, despite the existence of a few personal letters
requesting a sentence of gibbeting in individual cases, there is no univer-
sal legislation or general guideline extant. There are, however, records of
the Postmaster General applying on specic occasions for the body of a
mail robber to be hung in chains. For example, Lord Sandwich requested
in April 1770 that the body of John Franklin, convicted of the rob-
bery of the Bristol mail, be hung in chains. The judge turned down his
request on the grounds that the robbery had not involved violence, but
Sandwich went over his head to the High Sheriff to procure an order that
Franklin’s body be hung in chains near the place where the robbery was
Table 1.2 Crimes punished by hanging in chains, 1752–1832
Hanging in chains for all categories of offence, 1752–1832
Offence Number Percentage (%)
Murder (including Admiralty cases) 144 64.9
Mail robbery 31 14.0
Admiralty offences (not including murder) 23 10.4
Highway robbery 10 4.5
Burglary and housebreaking 7 3.2
Robbery 2 0.9
Shooting with intent to kill 2 0.9
Animal theft 1 0.5
Arson 1 0.5
Riot 1 0.5
Total 222 100.0
47
J.S. Cockburn (1994) ‘Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment’
Law and History Review 12(1): 155–79, p. 167.
48
G. Harper (1908) Half-hours with the Highwaymen; picturesque biographies and tradi-
tions of the knights of the road (Vol. 1) (London: Chapman and Hall), p. 206.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 23
committed. Interestingly, in this case, the Postmaster General offers no
other reason for his request than that gibbeting “had always been done in
cases of mail robberies”.49 It was thus perceived traditional practice rather
than any motivation articulated in a legal act that perpetuated the custom
of gibbeting mail robbers near the scene of their crime. The most fre-
quent crimes other than murder for which gibbeting was a punishment
were all capital crimes which threatened the orderly administration of the
capitalist state (although forgery does not seem to have been punished in
this way unless the criminal was also found guilty of other serious crimes).
It could thus be suggested that crimes against the State were more likely
to lead to the spectacular punishment of hanging in chains than private,
personal or domestic, but equally serious, crimes against the person or
burglary, which might be more likely to receive a sentence of dissection.
Smugglers
In the period immediately preceding the Murder Act, a large number of
men were hung in chains for smuggling. Between 1747 and 1752, 50
people were convicted of smuggling in the counties of Sussex and Kent,
of whom 42 were hanged, and 16 of those were also hung in chains.
There was clearly regional variation at play here also since none of the 23
smugglers convicted in East Anglia over the same period was sentenced
to any post-mortem punishment at all.50
interpreting the murder Act: dissection or hAnging
in chAins?
Whether a convicted murderer should be dissected or gibbeted was left
to the discretion of the judge, as was the inclusion of post-mortem pun-
ishment in the sentence of those found guilty of other crimes.
The rationale for deciding which people should be dissected and
which hung in chains is much harder to understand. When Thomas
Hanks was hung in chains in Gloucestershire in 1763 instead of being
49
State Papers, Southern Department SP 44/89/350.
50
Zoe Dyndor (2015) ‘The Gibbet in the Landscape: locating the criminal corpse in
mid-eighteenth-century England’, in R. Ward (ed.) A Global History of Execution and the
Criminal Corpse (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
24 S. TARLOW
dissected as originally specied, the local newspaper reported only that
such a punishment would be “better”.51 At the Hereford Lent Assizes
in 1770, all of the six men found guilty of the murder of William Powell
and sentenced to death were destined by the judge for dissection,52
but ultimately only four were dissected: William Spiggott and William
Walter Evan were hung in chains instead.53 Pamphlet accounts of their
crime and trial give no reason for this differential treatment—and the
two men gibbeted were neither more nor less culpable than those dis-
sected. A similar situation arose following the conviction of three men—
John Croxford, Benjamin Deacon and Richard Butlin—for murder at the
Northamptonshire assizes on 31 July 1764. Although the original sen-
tence was that all three should be sent for dissection under the terms of
the Murder Act, a warrant from the judge to the sheriff records a subse-
quent decision that Croxford alone should be hung in chains instead.54
Indeed, of 16 people sentenced to be dissected in Northamptonshire
between 1739 and 1832, at least ve were ultimately hung in chains
instead. Edward Corbett, convicted of murder at the Buckinghamshire
Assizes in 1773, was sentenced to be dissected, but his sentence was
amended to hanging in chains because, according to the Assize Calendar,
“no surgeon is willing to receive the said body”. Similarly, when William
Suffolk was executed in Norfolk in 1797, no surgeon came forward to
claim the body, so the court ordered instead that it be hung in chains
“near as may be where the said felony was perpetrated”55; and Thomas
Otley, executed for murder in 1752 in Suffolk, was “ordered to be
hanged in chains (no surgeon be willing to receive his body) pursuant
to the statute in such case lately made”.56 In Suffolk in 1783, James May
and Jeremiah Theobald were both convicted of murder and sentenced
to hanging and dissection. However, both bodies were instead hung
in chains at Eriswell, the scene of crime “at the request of the prosecu-
tor”, according to a pamphlet detailing their trial, although no further
51
N. Darby (2011) Olde Cotswold Punishments (Stroud: History Press), p. 24.
52
General Evening Post, 31 March–3 April 1770, issue 5690.
53
Independent Chronicle, 11–13 April 1770, issue 85.
54
TNA E389/243/410.
55
TNA E389/250/79 (Assize Calendar Norfolk 21 March 1797).
56
Sheriffs’ Cravings Suffolk 1752.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 25
explanation of this decision is given.57 The same happened nine years
later at the same assize court in the case of Roger Benstead,58 again with
no reason given, although a contemporary account notes that this part
of the sentence seemed to affect the condemned with a greater dread
than any other aspect of the sentence, including the execution itself.59 In
1794, John and Nathan Nichols, father and son, were both found guilty
of the same murder, also in Suffolk, and originally both sentenced to be
sent to the surgeons.60 However, after execution, the older man’s body
was hung in chains whereas the younger man was dissected.61
In researching this book, we were for some time puzzled by the fre-
quency with which the judge appeared to have changed his mind about
what kind of post-mortem provision should be applied. We encoun-
tered numerous cases where before the judge left town he directed
that an offender should be hung in chains rather than dissected. Such
voltes-faces never occurred the other way round (from hanging in
chains to dissection). The initially mystifying practice of substituting
the gibbet for the scalpel at what appeared to be the last minute was
explained by another piece of documentary evidence. The discovery of
a recorded meeting of all circuit justices shortly after the passage of the
Murder Act shows this practice to be an interpretation of the consen-
sus reached there that the proper sentence was normally to be hanging
until dead followed by delivery to a surgeon for dissection and anato-
misation. The order to hang in chains was to be made as an amend-
ment to the sentence delivered in open court.62 On many occasions,
this seems to have occurred as part of the “dead letter”—the instruc-
tions left by the judge at the end of an assizes listing which sentences
57
The Trial at Lage of Jeremiah Theobald, otherwise Hassell, and James May, otherwise
Folkes (Ipswich: Shave and Jackson) 1783.
58
Richard Deeks (1984) Some Suffolk Murders (Long Melford: R&K Tyrell), pp. 10–11.
59
The trial of Roger Benstead the elder (Bury St Edmunds: P. Gedge) 1792, p. 14.
60
The trial of John and Nathan Nichols, (Father and Son) (Bury St Edmunds: P. Gedge),
p. 8.
61
Diary of William Goodwin, surgeon, of Earl Soham Suffolk. Suff RO HD 365/3 vol. 2,
from 1791.
62
Judges’ resolution on the Manner of Sentencing under the Murder Act—National
Army Museum Archives, ref 6510–146(2), dated 7 May 1752.
26 S. TARLOW
of execution were to be actually enacted and who was to be reprieved.
The letter would be informed by representations made to the judge
based on local knowledge of the accused or attitudes towards their
crime. Decisions in the dead letter were not usually explained.
In most cases, then, no reason for hanging in chains rather than gib-
beting is given. Where a reason is stated, it relates to those cases where
hanging in chains was a pragmatic response to the absence of any sur-
geon willing to take the body for dissection. Whereas some kinds of
body were in high demand for dissection—young and t ones, large
ones, female ones and unusual ones—old, small, white, male ones were
less valuable. This may be the reason that no woman was ever hung in
chains under the Murder Act—since women were much less likely to
be accused of or condemned for murder, female bodies were only rarely
available to medical science under the terms of the Murder Act. The
bodies of executed women whose crimes fell under the Act were there-
fore highly prized for dissection. When John Swan and Elizabeth Jeffryes
were both convicted of the same murder in 1752, only Swan was hung
in chains, but Jeffryes’s fate is unclear63; and whereas William Winter
was hung in chains near Elsdon in Northumberland, the two women
convicted alongside him, Jane and Eleanor Clark, were both dissected.
Similarly, the decision to hang John Nicholls in chains and dissect his son
Nathan might also indicate that the younger, tter body was of greater
interest to surgeons than the body of an old man. In 1759, Surrey sur-
geons rejected the body of Robert Saxby altogether because he was too
old; he was therefore hung in chains instead.64 Medical interest might
also have inuenced the post-mortem fate of John Pycraft, who was exe-
cuted for murder in Norfolk in 1819. Pycraft was affected by some kind
of dwarsm. His measurements are given in the Bury and Norwich Post
of 25 August 1819 as 4’2” in height, with legs of 18”, arms of 13.5”
and his skull circumference as 23.5”. His body was sent for dissection
63
The trial of Swan and Jeffryes took place just before the Murder Act came into force.
They were both found guilty—Swan of petty treason and Jeffryes of murder—and both
hanged, but it seems that Jeffryes’s post-mortem fate was neither the gibbet nor the scal-
pel. The Authentick Memoirs of the Wicked Life and Transactions of Elizabeth Jeffryes (2nd
edn., London, 1752) claims that her body was taken away by her friends, as does the
London Evening-Post, 28–31 March 1752.
64
Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 11 August 1759, issue 2091.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 27
and his skeleton retained by the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital museum
where it was catalogued under his own name.65
Given this context, it is surprising that Toby Gill, “Black Toby”,
was hung in chains rather than dissected after his conviction for mur-
der in 1750. Convicted for the murder of a local girl, Ann Blakemore,
Gill, who was a drummer in Sir Robert Rich’s regiment, was gibbeted
at Blythburgh in Suffolk. Gill was described at the time as “a black” and
would normally therefore have been of interest to the surgeons.
the rise And fAll of the gibbet
For clarity, the term gibbet here is used to describe the whole structure
used to display the corpse of a criminal, including post and arm, chains
and cage. The framework from which execution by hanging took place is
called a scaffold or gallows. During the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, the terms gibbet and scaffold were sometimes used interchange-
ably; and “gibbet” could be used loosely to describe the whole edice,
or just the standing post, with the chains and cage described either in
those words or together as “irons” or “chains”. Variation in the technol-
ogy and design of the gibbet is discussed in the next chapter. A typical
gibbet, however, would comprise a wooden pole of up to twelve metres
xed securely into the ground. It would have a cross arm at the top
projecting on one side or sometimes on both sides to make a T shape,
usually braced with supporting cross struts. From the end of the arm, a
substantial iron hook or socket projected from which was suspended the
gibbet cage on a short length of chain. The cage itself was often anthro-
pomorphic and was always made of iron.
The peak popularity of gibbeting in England and Wales was dur-
ing the mid-eighteenth century, just before the Murder Act in 1752.
Figure 1.1 shows the number of gibbetings annually rising to a peak in
the 1740s and then declining rapidly. After 1800, there were very few
gibbetings in England and Wales; there were no gibbetings at all for
property crime after 1803 and very few for murder. Only two people
were hung in chains in the 1810s outside the Admiralty courts, and one
in the 1820 s. Another man sentenced to be hung in chains in 1827 near
Brigg, Lincolnshire, had his sentence remitted following a petition by the
65
NRO NNH 29/2 Catalogue of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum.
28 S. TARLOW
local inhabitants.66 The two sentences of gibbeting passed in the summer
of 1832, which turned out to be the last hurrah for hanging in chains in
Britain, were probably based on a misinterpretation of the Anatomy Act,
passed earlier that year, which removed the option of anatomical dissec-
tion for convicted murderers. In fact, the more usual alternative of burial
within prison grounds was already in use, but it is possible that judges
used to passing sentence of dissection believed that gibbeting was the
only possible sentence that remained open to them for convicted mur-
derers. There was also a widespread misapprehension at the time that the
power to hang in chains had been given to the courts by the Anatomy
Act, when the truth was that such powers had never been revoked but
had largely fallen into disuse until, in 1832, the Anatomy Act banned
what was generally the preferred option. The gibbetings of William
Jobling and James Cook that year aroused considerable media interest
and a general outcry among the educated classes.
In 1834, the practice of hanging in chains was formally abolished, two
years after Parliament ordered that the gibbet of James Cook be taken
0
1700s
1710s
1720s
1730s
1740s
1750s
1760s
1770s
1780s
1790s
1800s
1810s
1820s
1830s
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Gibbettings in England and Wales
Gibbettings in England and Wales
Fig. 1.1 Number of gibbetings per decade in England and Wales, 1700–1832
66
Andrews Bygone Punishments, p. 73.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 29
down from a road junction on the edge of Leicester, only three days after
being hung up there. By that stage, there was a very strong feeling that
hanging in chains was barbaric and ill-suited to a civilised age. A journal-
ist of the Leicester and Nottingham Journal on 18 August 1832 reected
presciently on the dismantling of Cook’s gibbet:
we are glad that the disgusting sight has been removed considering it, as
we do, the revival of a barbarous custom which a more humanized age
has long exploded from the statute book. That the application should have
been made in the case of one of the most brutal murders ever commit-
ted, is singular; but it will be attended with one important effect. James
Cook will be the last murderer that will be sentenced to be hung in chains,
since no Judge can hereafter think of awarding the punishment to ordinary
murderers while the most atrocious delinquent of that description has been
ungibbeted by an order bearing the King’s sign manual.
It is worth noting, however, that disgust at the sight was not sufciently
widely shared to prevent crowds of more than 20,000 attending Cook’s
gibbeting.67
During the debate accompanying the rst presentation of the motion
to end gibbeting in 1834, one M.P. pointed out that a judge in Ireland
had “only the other day” ordered a murderer to be dissected, despite
the ofcial cessation of that form of post-mortem punishment two years
earlier, because he considered it “preferable” to hanging in chains.68
The history of gibbeting in Ireland follows a different trajectory to the
English story. Hanging in chains was still widespread in early nineteenth-
century Ireland, perhaps because it was valued as an exemplary punish-
ment for crimes with an element of sedition or those judged to threaten
the orderly functioning of the State. In England, these include the crimes
of piracy, smuggling and mail robbery; in Ireland, crimes which imper-
illed the tenuous grip of British control were more likely to be pun-
ished by spectacular treatments of the body, such as hanging in chains.
The landscape of County Louth in Ireland, notable to the British as a
breeding ground of sedition and a threat to the authority of the State,
was described around 1816 as being “studded with gibbets” containing
the remains of Ribbonmen, a group of anti-English Irish Catholics, set
67
Leicester and Nottingham Journal, 18 August 1832.
68
Hansard HC Deb 13 March 1834, vol. 22, cc155–7.
30 S. TARLOW
up near the homes of those convicted (in Carleton’s vivid account, the
tarred sacks containing the remains of the executed Ribbonmen attracted
so many ies that the sound of buzzing could be heard some distance
away).69 Although the overall capital conviction rate in Ireland was lower
than in England, executions which severely damaged the body and caused
extensive pain were comparatively more frequent. Bodies were gibbeted
in Ireland fairly commonly during the eighteenth century, despite pub-
lic unease which Kelly attributes both to disgust at the smell and sight of
decaying bodies, especially in built-up areas, and to religious and ethical
scruples. It may be that ambivalence about the post-mortem exhibition of
the body was more pronounced in Catholic countries, although there is
no doctrinal reason why this should be the case.70
some common misconceptions
The technical and geographical details of gibbeting will be reviewed in
the next chapter, but rst it is worth correcting or clarifying some wide-
spread misapprehensions about hanging in chains, arising mostly from
popular or secondary sources.
Myth 1: Gibbeting Is the Same as Execution by Hanging
While gibbet can be a synonym for gallows or scaffold, gibbeting refers
only to the practice of displaying the dead (or, exceptionally, dying) body
in a suspended device. In this book, I refer to the structure used for car-
rying out executions by hanging as the scaffold or gallows and use the
term gibbet to refer only to the cage and its pole. Sometimes, particu-
larly in parts of southern England, criminals were executed at the scene
of their crime, although this practice had declined in popularity by the
time of the Murder Act.71 When this happened, the criminal would be
69
W. Carleton (1894) The life of William Carleton being his autobiography and letters;
and an account of his life and writings, from the point at which the autobiography breaks off,
edited by David J. O’Donoghue, p. 134.
70
J. Kelly (2015) ‘Punishing the dead: execution and the executed body in eighteenth-
century Ireland’, in R. Ward (ed.) A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse
(Basingstoke: Palgrave).
71
S. Poole (2008) ‘A lasting and salutary warning’: incendiarism, rural order and
England’s last scene of crime execution’. Rural History 19: 163–77.
1 SOME FURTHER TERROR AND PECULIAR MARK OF INFAMY 31
hanged from a temporary scaffold and then taken down, encased in a
gibbet cage and hoisted back onto the same structure.
Myth 2: Gibbeting Involves Leaving People to Die in an Iron Cage
Popular reconstructions of gibbets—such as occur in local ghost walks,
computer games and theme parks—often misrepresent the gibbet as a
kind of oubliette, where condemned prisoners were left to die of thirst or
exposure. There is no evidence that by the eighteenth century this ever
happened in Britain. The Old Englander reports that in France malefac-
tors might be sentenced to hang in chains for two days before execution,
being left bareheaded and fed only on bread and water, and then exe-
cuted on the third day.72 There are cases of gibbeting alive known from
the Caribbean during the plantation period, always in regard to a slave
found guilty of a treasonous crime.73
Myth 3: There Were Traditional Gibbeting Sites
Many larger towns had a traditional place of execution, especially those
in which assizes were held, usually on land close to the county gaol.
Larger cities might have a permanent gallows, although several larger
towns, including Bath for example, did not have any traditional place of
execution. Gibbet locations, as opposed to scaffolds for execution, were
generally determined by other factors such as proximity to the scene of
the crime, public visibility and the ease of maintaining public order in the
large crowds that often attended a gibbeting.
Myth 4: Gibbets Were Occupied by a Series of Bodies
Some of the gibbets used by the Admiralty courts seem to have occupied
customary locations and to have hosted a series of bodies. The gibbet
cage now in possession of the London Docklands museum, which was
72
Old Englander, 25 January 1752.
73
William Beckford, Remarks Upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica (London,
1788), 93; Trevor Burnard Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His
Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), p. 151.
32 S. TARLOW
almost certainly an Admiralty one, shows signs of repair which would be
redundant on a single-use artefact. However, most cases of hanging in
chains as a result of sentences passed by the assize courts involved mak-
ing a special gibbet-cage tted to a single individual which then stayed
in situ with the remains of that particular criminal until the gibbet nally
fell or was removed, which was often many decades later (see discussion
in Chap. 3). Gibbet irons were not normally reused. This made the costs
of gibbeting a single individual very high. The details of exactly how and
where a gibbeting took place are considered further in the next chapter.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
33
CHAPTER 2
How to Hang in Chains: How, Where
and When Eighteenth-Century Sheriffs
Organised a Gibbeting
© The Author(s) 2017
S. Tarlow, The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain,
Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-60089-9_2
Abstract The criminal corpse undertook a journey from the scaffold to
the gibbet. The gibbet was commonly located near the scene of crime
and in a conspicuous location, usually within sight of a major road.
Customary gibbet places existed in London and in some coastal loca-
tion, but usually the body was transported from the place of execution
to the place of hanging in chains. Sometimes, especially earlier in our
period, criminals were executed and hung in chains from the same scaf-
fold at the scene of crime. Gibbet cages were made quickly and did not
develop local styles. The scene of a gibbeting was often a rowdy and car-
nivalesque occasion.
Keywords Gibbet · Landscape · Technology · Location · Carnival
the process
From the Scaffold to the Gibbet
The progress of the body from the scaffold where execution had
occurred to suspension in a gibbet cage typically involved several stages.
After execution, the body was left hanging for up to about an hour,
both to ensure that there was no sign of life remaining (although recent
research by Elizabeth Hurren suggests that in a substantial minority of
34 S. TARLOW
cases even after such a long period of hanging medical death had not
taken place by the time the body was removed from the scaffold) and
to allow the crowds who came to view the execution enough time to
inspect the body, after which it was taken down and removed to some
place where it could be prepared for suspension and enclosed in irons.1
In some cases, there was a further opportunity to display the new corpse
before the gibbeting, with nancial benets for those of an entrepre-
neurial bent. After the execution of Robert Carleton at Diss, Norfolk,
in 1742, for example, his body was carried back to the house where the
murder was committed and “hung up upon a balk in the middle of the
room, and shewn at two pence a piece. The following day his body was
put into its gibbet and displayed at Diss common”.2 Carleton’s case was
especially salacious, as he was found guilty of the murder of his male
lover’s wife.
There is little evidence about how the body was dressed for gibbeting.
According to newspaper reports, the body of James Cook (d. 1832) was
dressed again in the clothes in which he had been executed—probably
his best clothes. The sheriffs’ cravings for Shropshire 1759 itemise the
costs of “plank cords and hair cloth to inclose the bodies” of two men
between execution and gibbeting.
Several newspaper accounts of the preparation of the body men-
tion that the corpse was ‘tarred’ or ‘dipped in tar’ before being gib-
beted. No soft tissue of a gibbeted body survives to allow us to test
this, although tarring is frequently mentioned in secondary sources,
usually without additional evidence. Neither tar nor anything like it is
ever itemised in the sheriffs’ cravings relating to gibbetings, despite
the separate listing of other apparently trivial expenses such as the cost
of ale for guards, rope for a noose, or a stool for a burning. ‘Dipping
the body in tar’ is mentioned in a few of the later newspaper accounts,
such as the account of the execution and display of James Cook in 1832.
It is possible that tar was used only very occasionally, despite a popular
belief that tarring was a normal part of the process. Moreover, it is not
clear what this ‘tar’ might be: if used, it is unlikely to have been a very
1
Elizabeth Hurren (2015) Dissecting the Criminal Corpse: Post-Execution Punishment
from the Murder Act (1752) to the Anatomy Act (1832) (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
2
D. Stoker 1990. ‘The tailor of Diss: sodomy and murder in a Norfolk town’. Paper
published online at http://users.aber.ac.uk/das/texts/tailor_of_diss.htm, accessed
8/7/15.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 35
heavy caulking bitumen which would obscure the individual identity of
the body beyond recognition, and one can only imagine that it would
make dressing the corpse and enclosing it in its gibbet cage a very dif-
cult and sticky business. James Cook’s body was dressed again in his
normal clothes following tarring, so the process probably left the body
more or less the same size and thus is unlikely to involve a thick, viscous
or gluey kind of tar. It was certainly ammable, however, if the tale of
the Chevin highwaymen is true. Cox recounts a story of no clear date
which is at present unsubstantiated in the historical records: three high-
waymen were apprehended and condemned to hanging in chains around
the middle of the eighteenth century. Their bodies were gibbeted at the
top of the Chevin near Belper in Derbyshire. “After the bodies had been
hanging there a few weeks, one of the friends of the criminals set re,
at night-time, to the big gibbet that bore all three. The father of our
aged informant, and two or three others of the cottagers nearby, seeing
a glare of light, went up the hill, and there they saw the sickening spec-
tacle of the three bodies blazing away in the darkness! So thoroughly did
the tar aid this cremation, that the next morning only the links of the
iron chains remained on the site of the gibbet”. A similar story is told of
the ‘aming gibbet of Galley Hill’ in Bedfordshire, which may relate to
the 1744 gibbeting of John Knott, who was hung in chains on ‘Luton
Down’.3 Whatever tarring took place, it at best only delayed the nor-
mal process of decomposition. An article in the Buckinghamshire Record
Ofce written by J. Wharton in 1860 records that farmers living up the
valley from the place where Corbett was gibbeted on Bierton Common
were unable to open their windows for about a year because of the smell
from the body.4
Despite folkloric—and untrue—accounts of live gibbetings, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries criminals were always executed
before being hung in chains. In the rare cases that a condemned person
managed to evade the gallows by taking their own life, hanging in chains
3
J.C. Cox (1890), untitled note The Antiquary (November 1890), p. 214. The Galley
Hill story is told at http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/playstory39-the-aming-
gibbet-of-galley-hill.html, but there are numerous historical errors and no original sources
cited in this retelling.
4
J. Wharton (1863) ‘The last gibbet in Buckinghamshire’ Records of Buckinghamshire
(vol. 2).
36 S. TARLOW
might be carried out to conrm the death. Joseph Armstrong, sentenced
to hang for the murder of his employer’s wife in 1777, managed to break
his own neck in prison but nevertheless was gibbeted near the home of
his victim in Cheltenham “to obviate every doubt that may be raised
of his not being dead”.5 This contrasts with the burial at Tewkesbury
crossroads of condemned murderer William Birch, following his suicide
in prison in 1791. Staked burial of suicides in the road was common
for those who could be considered to have evaded punishment by tak-
ing their own lives, but gibbeting would accomplish the same goals of
keeping the suicide out of consecrated ground and materially conrming
their deviant status through non-normative mortuary treatment.
locAting A gibbet: the mAcro-geogrAphy of gibbeting
In most of England, post-mortem punishment was ordered by the circuit
judge presiding at the assize court. Nevertheless, there are clear regional
differences in the frequency with which gibbeting was ordered. Table 2.1
shows the frequency of gibbetings by county and decade through
England and Wales. The data for the period before the Murder Act is less
secure than for the later part of the eighteenth century, and numbers for
the decades at the beginning of the century are very incomplete.
London (mostly recorded under “Middlesex” in the county table
above) had far and away the most gibbetings. This is due in part to the
fact that many of the most serious crimes were tried in London, even
if committed elsewhere. London also had a huge population and well-
known social and economic problems.6 However, even in the rural
provinces, there were marked differences in the frequency of hanging in
chains. In the counties of Sussex, Essex, Gloucestershire and Hampshire,
for example, ve or six gibbetings sometimes occurred within a decade,
whereas in Cornwall there were none at all during the whole period and
in County Durham there was only one. These gures take no account of
the size or population of a county or of the conviction rates for murder
and capital crime.
5
N. Darby (2011). Olde Cotswold Punishments (Stroud: The History Press), pp. 24–25.
6
J. White (2012) London in the eighteenth century: a great and monstrous thing (London:
Bodley Head).
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 37
Table 2.1 The frequency of gibbetings by county and decade through England and Wales
1700* 1710* 1720* 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 County total
Beds 1 1 2
Berks 1 1 2 1 5
Bucks 2 1 1 1 5
Caernarfon 2 1 3
Camarths 1 1 2
Cambs 1 1 2 1 5
Cheshire 2 2 1 4 9
Cornwall 0
Cumbria 1 2 3
Denbeighs 1 4 1 3
Derbs 1 1 2
Devon 2 1 1 4 2 10
Dorset 1 1 2
Durham 1 1 2
Essex 1 6 1 8
Flintshire 1 1 2
Glamorgs 1 2 2 1 6
Gloucs 1 2 5 1 2 2 3 16
Hamps 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 5 3 19
Herefs 1 2 1 4
Herts 3 2 3 2 10
Hunts 1 1
Kent 1 2 3 3 2 1 1 13
Lancs 1 2 2 1 6
Leics 1 1 2
Lincs 2 1 1 2 1 1 8
(continued)
*Figures for gibbetings before the 1730s are mostly unavailable
38 S. TARLOW
Table 2.1 (continued)
1700* 1710* 1720* 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 County total
Middx 5 5 12 16 13 4 6 3 2 2 68
Mons 1 1
Montgoms 1 1
North’nd 1 1 2
Norfolk 3 2 2 5 12
Notts 1 1 2
Northants 1 1 1 1 4
Oxon 1 1 2
Pembs 1 1
Radnor 1 1 2
Rutland 1 2 3
Salop 2 1 2 1 6
Somerset 2 1 5 3 1 12
Staffs 2 1 3 1 7
Suffolk 1 2 2 1 2 2 10
Surrey 2 3 2 3 1 3 1 15
Sussex 2 10 1 4 17
Warks 1 3 3 1 8
Wilts 2 2 2 1 7
Worcs 1 1 1 3
Yorks 1 2 2 1 1 7
Decade total 5 5 23 44 65 40 41 26 38 39 10 2 1 2 338
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 39
The Micro-Geography of Gibbeting
Location of gibbets was specied neither in law nor, usually, in the
judge’s sentence. Sometimes, the sentence of hanging in chains specied
only that the gibbet should be “at a convenient location” and close to
the scene of crime. My attempts to locate the original positions of gib-
bets have mostly been unable to pinpoint exact locations, but I have
often been able to identify the place within 50 metres or so because a
particular road junction or landmark is mentioned (see map). Newspaper
reports are sometimes very specic: William Whittle (executed 1766 in
Lancaster) was gibbeted, according to the newspaper, “at the Four Lane
Ends, within forty yards of his father-in-law’s house, and a hundred
yards of his late dwelling house, about three miles from Preston, on the
Liverpool road by way of Croston”.7
There is some geographical variability in the kind of locations that
were selected as suitable sites for the erection of a gibbet. London gib-
bets were erected in customary places on areas of open land; those con-
victed of maritime crimes might be hung in chains around the coast
where they would be visible to shipping. Both of these types of gibbet-
ings are considered below. However, for the majority of those sentenced
to gibbeting at provincial assizes, the three most prevalent concerns
when selecting a gibbet location are proximity to scene of crime, visi-
bility from the public road, and the capacity of the immediate locale to
cope with a large crowd. Although the second of these is rarely speci-
ed in either the sentence or the cravings, a study of the locations of
gibbets, where known, demonstrates a close correlation between gibbet
sites and proximity to what are now A-roads in Britain. A 1755 travellers’
guide to London explains to foreign visitors that gibbets were situated
on the highway “near the Place where the Fact was done, to perpetuate
the Villainy of the Crime, and to serve as an Example”.8 To be effec-
tive as a warning or a deterrent, the gibbet had to be highly visible. But
this requirement was sometimes in conict with the needs of travellers
to pass freely without being either inconvenienced by crowds of vulgar
spectators or brought into such close contact with the decomposing
bodies that delicate sensibilities would be offended. The location of John
7
General Evening Post, 12–15 April 1766 issue 5069.
8
Anon (1755) London in Miniature (London: C. Corbett), p. 217.
40 S. TARLOW
Haines’s gibbet on Hounslow Heath, erected in 1799, was criticised in
one London newspaper for being “shamefully placed close to the high
road”, a criticism rejected by another paper, which claimed that in fact
“so far from being offensively situated, [it] is placed at the distance of at
least ve hundred yards from the high road”.9
When the gibbet was sited, use was sometimes made of natural fea-
tures in the landscape that enhanced its visibility. When John Naden was
hung in chains in Staffordshire in 1731, his gibbet was erected “on the
highest hill on Gun Heath” within a quarter mile of the house where
he murdered his master.10 Lingard’s gibbet near St Peter’s rock in the
Derbyshire peaks was sited near the main road and close to the toll-
booth whose keeper he had murdered. Its visibility from both the scene
of crime and the highway more generally was accentuated by taking
advantage of a natural local landmark (Fig. 2.1). The roads along which
gibbets were located were also, as far as possible, major routes, and the
gibbets were close to junctions where they would be noticeable from at
least two roads. Ogilby’s seventeenth-century linear maps of British jour-
neys show a number of gibbets, marked as waymarks in the same way
that prominent windmills or stands of trees are included. Interestingly,
when the 1628 gibbet of John Felton, murderer of the Duke of
Buckingham, fell down, it was replaced by an obelisk in 1782—not as a
memorial to Felton or the Duke of Buckingham but to serve as a bound-
ary marker as the old Southsea gibbet had come to mark the boundary
of the borough of Portsmouth (Fig. 2.2). The obelisk, photographed in
the 1930s, has since disappeared.11
In this period, however, there is comparatively little evidence of the
re-use of archaeological sites for gibbets, in contrast to widespread
medieval practice and practice on the continent in early modernity.12
9
Whitehall Evening Post, 12–14 March 1799, issue 8056; Morning Herald, 15 March
1799, issue 5769.
10
Daily Courant, 13 September 1731.
11
www.memorials.inportsmouth.co.uk/southsea/obelisk.htm.
12
See, for example, H. Williams (2006) Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Andrew Reynolds (2009) Anglo-Saxon deviant
burial customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press); J. Coolen (2014) ‘Places of justice and
awe: the topography of gibbets and gallows in medieval and early modern north-western
and Central Europe’ World Archaeology 45(5), pp. 762–79.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 41
John Nichols, whose gibbet cage was excavated in the twentieth century
and now is on display in Moyses Hall, Bury St Edmunds, was originally
hung in chains on a prehistoric burial mound called Troston Mount at
Honington in Suffolk, and Michael Morey’s Hump on the Isle of Wight
is now named for the murderer gibbeted there in 1737 but is in fact a
Bronze Age mound. Combe gibbet, erected in 1676, makes ostenta-
tious use of an earlier monument—the Inkpen neolithic long barrow on
Gallows Down—and according to most stories of that double gibbet, it
was placed on a parish boundary in order that the costs might be shared
Fig. 2.1 St Peter’s rock, Derbyshire, where Anthony Lingard was hung in
chains in 1815 (photo: Sarah Tarlow)
42 S. TARLOW
Fig. 2.2 Felton’s
obelisk in Portsmouth.
(Portsmouth:
Charpentier)
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 43
between the two adjacent parishes to which the two convicted murderers
belonged, so the mound’s function as a parish boundary marker might
be more signicant than its archaeological heritage. Whyte suggests in
her Norfolk-based study that gibbets were usually sited on or close to
parish boundaries, where they crossed open or common land, a location
which had a symbolic importance of considerable time depth. She traces
the use of boundary points for criminal execution and burial to early
medieval beliefs about the liminality of the dangerous and deviant dead,
through the traditional use of boundaries for siting gallows by the mano-
rial courts of the later middle ages. Whyte argues that, by the later medi-
eval period, the placement of gallows at parish boundaries “was intended
not so much to convey any idea of territorial ‘marginality’, but rather
to denote the eviction of the condemned from the spiritual core of the
community—represented in the landscape by the church and the grave-
yard”.13 My research has not found the close relationship between gib-
bet locations and parish boundaries to be so evident elsewhere; the twin
principles of siting the gibbet close to a public road and near the scene
of crime, however, do produce a gibbeted landscape of marginal land—
commons, verges, heaths and forests, which might increase the chances
that a gibbet would be sited on or close to a parish boundary. The inter-
pretation that gibbet locations are geographical representations of the
criminal’s exclusion from normal society is strong and, though probably
not the primary determinant of siting the gibbet, undoubtedly added to
the force of witnessing it.
The likelihood that large crowds of people would attend the gibbeting
militated towards the selection of open or common land as gibbet sites,
but on other occasions private land was used. The sheriffs’ cravings for
Devon in 1752 note a cost incurred “for an express to go to Mr. Wiscotts
about 40 miles to ask leave to erect a gibbet on his manor in order to
hang up the body of John Young (not receiving the order for so doing til
he was executed)”.
As conspicuous locations in public places, gibbets acted as meeting
points and landmarks. Jeremiah Abershaw’s gibbet on Putney Heath
is mentioned in the press as the location of a boxing match in 1796
and 1800, a duel in 1798, and a military tattoo in 1803. In 1773, at
Kennington Common
13
N. Whyte (2003) ‘The deviant dead in the Norfolk landscape’ Landscapes 1, p. 35.
44 S. TARLOW
Several gentlemen, frequenters of a very genteel public house not far from
Duke’s Court, Bow Street, Covent Garden, intend in a few days to decide
a wager depending on a game at Trap Ball on Kennington Common in
a very whimsical and humorous manner; three fourths of the party being
either old, lame with gout corns or other inammations affecting feet and
legs, while the rest are young, nimble and alert, have unanimously agreed
to play the game each person in a wheel barrow, which is managed by
the strongest and most fore footed Irish chairman anywhere to be found.
As this expedient puts all parties on equality, it is expected there will be
much sport and fair play unless charioteers should be bribed to jockey one
another. The parties to rendezvous as near the gibbets as possible.14
One of the remarkable features of gibbet locations is the apparent irrel-
evance of buildings or monuments that signify State power. Laqueur has
noted that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century executions did not
take place close to the civic or judicial apparatus of State or local author-
ity but rather customarily used a suburban location of little distinction.15
Similarly, the places where the body was xed for display were very rarely
in urban locations and were usually far from any building or monument
meaningful to the working of the institutions of State, although they
were rarely far from roads.
Proximity to the scene of crime often also resulted in proximity to the
home of the criminal, although there is no evidence that gibbets were
deliberately sited to be close to the home of either the criminal or the
victim. Such siting, however, could have harsh consequences for the fam-
ily of the gibbeted man. Not only would they be confronted regularly
with the horrible spectacle of the body of their relative in the process
of decay which would be emotionally upsetting, their friends and neigh-
bours would also be constantly reminded of the evil done by their kin.
This was the reason that Thomas Willdey’s family petitioned the sher-
iff in 1734 asking for his body to be removed from its site on Witley
Common near Coventry: the innocent and respectable members of the
family were subject to comment, abuse and loss of trade in their local
14
Middlesex Journal or Universal Evening Post, 22–24 July 1773, issue 674.
15
T. Laqueur (1989) ‘Crowds, carnivals and the State in English executions, 1604–
1868’, in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine, J.M. Rosenheim (eds.) The First Modern Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 305–55, p. 312.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 45
area by reason of the continuing presence of Willdey’s “offensive”
body.16 Thomas Jackson, convicted of robbing the mail, was hung in
chains on Methwold common “near the place where he committed the
robbery”, which was “directly opposite to the dwelling of his unfor-
tunate family”.17 In 1797, an estate map of the village of Nether (or
Lower) Hambleton in Rutland, now drowned beneath Rutland Water,
annotated one cottage with a cross and the note “where you never go—
mother to the young men that were hanged”.18 The young men in ques-
tion were the Weldon brothers, gibbeted for murder within sight of their
parents’ cottage. One can only imagine the difculties of living on in a
small community and enduring every day the sight of your sons’ dead
bodies, as well as what sounds like ostracism by your neighbours.
Hanging at the Scene of Crime
Gibbets were usually erected for the display of the dead body only; the
criminal had actually died on a scaffold constructed at the customary
place of execution for that town.
Steve Poole has studied the incidence of scene-of-crime executions
in Britain.19 Between 1720 and 1830, at least 211 people were hanged
on specially erected scaffolds at the scene of their crime. More than half
of these crime-scene hangings took place in the southeast (London and
Surrey) and in Gloucestershire and Somerset. Most of those executed at
the scene of crime were taken down and disposed of elsewhere, but a
minority were subsequently enclosed in gibbet cages and then hung up
again on the same framework. Poole suggests that although the sheriff
16
TNA SP 36/32/115.
17
London Chronicle, 1–3 April 1790, issue 5244; Public Advertiser, 17 April 1790, issue
17403.
18
S. Sleath and R. Ovens (2007) ‘Lower Hambleton in 1797’, in R. Ovens and S. Sleath
(eds.) The Heritage of Rutland Water (Rutland Record Series number 5) Oakham: Rutland
Local History and Record Society, pp. 193–209.
19
Steve Poole (2015) ‘For the Benet of Example’: Crime-Scene Executions in England,
1720–1830’, in R. Ward (ed.) A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse.
Basingstoke: Palgrave: 71–101; Steve Poole (2008) ‘A lasting and salutary warning’:
incendiarism, rural order and England's last scene of crime execution’, Rural History 19,
pp. 163–77.
46 S. TARLOW
rarely made explicit the reason for holding an execution at the scene of
the crime instead of in the customary location, crimes of brutal murder
and crimes involving foreigners or where there was a high risk of crowd
disorder were most likely to be singled out in this way. Scene-of-crime
executions were highly personalised and related with a pleasing symme-
try to the crime, which might have helped to satisfy the popular appetite
for balanced revenge.20 Demonstrations of State power in out-of-the-
way spots also helped, argues Poole, to re-establish local authority in iso-
lated rural areas. Contemporary commentators were also impressed by
the sentimental potential of the malefactor’s last moments incorporating
a view of his childhood haunts and the place of his undoing. A powerful
dramatic experience such as a scaffold confession or visible moment of
contrition would be more readily provoked and make a more emotion-
ally powerful impression in this highly theatrical setting.
Gibbets in the Landscape
The presence of a gibbet could change the experience of a local land-
scape for a long time after its erection, even to the present day. The large
crowds and carnival atmosphere of the newly erected gibbet would con-
tinue for only a few weeks, but the memory of the unusual event would
last a lifetime for those who had been present. Moreover, the gibbet
itself often remained standing for many decades and would affect both
the experience of travelling through the landscape and the way in which
the landscape was known. Gibbet locations and former gibbet locations
acted as landmarks. The inclusion of eight gibbets on Faden’s 1797 map
of Norfolk demonstrates that the gibbets were important landmarks.
Earlier national maps, such as Ogilby’s Britannia of 1675, show several
gibbets along with windmills, bridges and other xed points by which
the progress of a road journey would be marked.
A gibbet might remain in place for many decades. Since they were often
ten metres or more in height, they were conspicuous in the landscape and
affected the way that local people knew and experienced the area, through
giving new names to the roads and elds where they were sited, and by
giving emotional impact to local journeys, or even motivating the creation
of new routes. Ralph’s Lane and Tom Otter’s Lane in Lincolnshire, Old
20
Public discussion at the time of the Murder Act included a number of voices in favour
of some sort of lex talionis—a punishment regime which mirrors the nature of the crime.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 47
Parr Road in Banbury and Curry’s Point near Whitley Bay are among the
places named after the criminals who were gibbeted there. The numerous
instances of ‘Gibbet Woods’, ‘Gibbet Hill’ and ‘Gibbet Lane’ in England
are hard to date and in most cases are probably medieval in origin, but
a number of those are associated with known eighteenth-century gibbets,
such as the Gibbet Hill Lane at Scrooby, close to the 1779 gibbet of John
Spencer (Fig. 2.3). What was it like to travel through a landscape popu-
lated with the remains of the dead? Sources suggest that, for most people
who lived close to these structures or encountered them regularly, it was
at best distasteful and often quite horrifying and that people would take
measures to avoid passing a gibbet when possible, especially at night. A
report in the Buckinghamshire archives notes that
“the footpath running from ‘Chalkhouse Arms’ and continuing back
along the back of the hovels in Bierton, as far as ‘the milestone’ dates
from this execution, and was made in order to avoid passing the gibbet
Fig. 2.3 Road sign, Gibbet Hill Lane, Scrooby (photo: Sarah Tarlow)
48 S. TARLOW
[of Corbett, d. 1773]”.21 W.H.B. Sanders22 says that the former ostler at
a nearby inn recalled seeing Gervase Matcham’s gibbet on rough ground
adjacent to the Great North Road:
It often used to frit me as a lad. I have seen horses frit with it. The coach
and carriage people were always on the look out for it. Oh yes! I can
remember it rotting away, bit by bit, and the red rags apping from it.
After a while they took it down and very pleased I were to see the last of it.
The ostler’s revulsion was shared by the young Charlotte Latham, who
remembered the full sensory assault of having to pass a gibbet on the
Brighton Road in her childhood: “Standing on the wide desolate down,
with all its fearful associations, it was an object of great terror to me in
my youthful days; and the dread of seeing it and hearing my nurse repeat
her oft-told tale of the murderer who had been hung on it in chains, and
how he had been swinging on a windy night and heard rattling his irons,
made the prospect of a visit to the sea-side, which involved the sight of
the gallows anything but pleasurable”.23
Wordsworth famously remembered his encounter with the site of
Thomas Nicholson’s gibbet at Penrith. Nicholson had been gibbeted in
1767, and by the time Wordsworth came to the spot
“The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones
And iron case were gone”.24
However, as Duncan Wu notes, if Wordsworth is reminiscing about
the year 1775, the gibbet mast would not have mouldered down and
indeed a ve-year-old child would probably not have ridden so far unac-
companied. Wu suggests that another Cumbrian gibbet may have been
intended.25 Whatever the case, The Prelude is not an accurate historical
record but, for our present purposes, a good indicator of the response
of a sensitive Romantic spirit to the presence of gibbets in the landscape:
Wordsworth “ed/Faltering and fain, and Ignorant of the road”.
21
From a letter dated April 18 1860, signed by J. Wharton to Rev. C. Lowndes. At
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/corbettonenamestudy/First/Books/Extract2.htm.
22
W.H.B. Sanders (1887) Legends and traditions of Huntingdon (London: Simpkin,
Marshall and Co.), pp. 103–04.
23
Charlotte Latham (1868) Some West Sussex superstitions lingering in 1868, collected by
Charlotte Latham at Fittleworth (London: The Folk-Lore Society).
24
W. Wordsworth The Prelude 1805 version 11: lines 290–01; lines 299–300.
25
D. Wu (2002) Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 465.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 49
When Mary Hardy, a Norfolk farmer’s wife, visited North
Yorkshire, she made a special trip to see the gibbet of Eugene Aram in
Knaresborough 16 years after it had been erected there.26
Out of the Ordinary
Most gibbets were erected in rural areas by county sheriffs in direct
response to an assize court judgement of a single person. There were,
however, two variants of hanging in chains which followed different cus-
toms—those in London and those carried out by the Admiralty courts.
Let us look briey at both.
Exception 1: London
London was an exceptional city throughout the period of study, as it has
been throughout post-Roman British history and as it remains today.
Those convicted of a capital offence in London were more likely to die
than those convicted elsewhere in Britain (where pardons were common
or a non-capital sentence was substituted).27 Although London had only
10% of the population, it produced 30% of the executed bodies. This
exceptionalism also affected the location of London gibbets. Whereas in
most of Britain gibbets were erected for their proximity to the scene of
crime and for visibility from the main road, those sentenced to hanging
in chains in the metropolis were not put close to the place of their crimes
but in one of a small number of traditional gibbet locations. These were
usually pieces of open land just outside the city but adjacent to one of
the main roads in and out of London. Finchley Common, Hounslow
Heath, Bow Common and Shepherd’s Bush were all areas used for sev-
eral gibbets, and a number of others were erected along the Edgeware
Road. Although these locations did not relate to the details of the crime
or indeed to the criminal’s biography in any way, they were well chosen
for public visibility and, for the most part, permitted the formation of
large gibbet crowds without threatening public order. The reason for sit-
ing London gibbets on one of a few regularly used open locations rather
26
Mary Hardy’s Diary (ed. B. Cozens-Hardy). 1938. Norfolk Record Society Vol. 37.
27
P. King and R. Ward (2016) ‘Rethinking the Bloody Code in Eighteenth-Centre
Britain: Capital Punishment at the Centre and on the Periphery’ Past and Present (2016).
50 S. TARLOW
than at the scene of crime is not discursively addressed in contemporary
literature, but it is likely that the dense urban landscape in which most
of the crimes took place was impractical for erecting gibbets. Although
the streets and squares of London hosted various carnivals, markets and
events, these were ephemeral events. Gibbets normally remained stand-
ing for decades. The large crowds drawn to a gibbeting could not be
accommodated in an orderly way in the narrow roads of the capital,
where trafc would be stopped and the risk of public disorder was always
high. Moreover, the continuing presence of a rotting corpse among
the dense habitations of the living would surely have been considered
unpleasant even before the hygienic reforms of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury would have condemned it as unsanitary. Early nineteenth-century
reformers campaigning for the closure of overfull urban graveyards
emphatically condemned the proximity of dead bodies to the places of
the living. The ‘miasmas’ of infection produced by the decaying body
had injurious or fatal consequences for the health of the living.28
Exception 2: The Admiralty Courts and Maritime Crimes
In addition to those criminals who passed through the normal assize or
London courts, at least 87 men were sentenced to death by the Admiralty
courts between 1726 and 1830, and the records of the Admiralty court
enable some analysis of this group (Table 2.2). The Admiralty courts
dealt with crimes committed at sea and were mostly for murder at sea or
piracy. Mutiny, theft and sinking or destroying a ship also resulted in a
small number of capital convictions. Of these 87 men, at least 38 were
gibbeted, at least 3 were dissected, 6 were interred without further pun-
ishment, 3 had their sentences commuted to transportation, one was res-
cued from the scaffold, and the fate of the others is unknown, although
most of them were sentenced to dissection. We have not been able to
trace the ultimate fate of some of those sentenced. Even if we assume that
none of those whose ultimate fate is unknown was gibbeted, 38 out of
87 is a very high proportion—much higher than the proportion of mur-
derers sentenced to be hung in chains by the terrestrial courts. Hanging
in chains for those convicted by the Admiralty Court was distinctive in
a number of ways. First, the Admiralty courts made repeated use of cus-
tomary locations for both execution and gibbeting. Most executions were
28
See, for example, G. Walker (1839) Gatherings from Graveyards (London: Longman).
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 51
Table 2.2 Admiralty Court convictions resulting in hanging in chains
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1726 John Jean (Captain
Jane)
Murder Friday, 13 May Unknown Gibbeted Greenwich Gale/ECCO
1726 John Gow Piracy and Murder 11 June 1726 Unknown Gibbeted Greenwich Gale/ECCO
1726 James William Piracy and Murder 11 June 1726 Unknown Gibbeted Blackwall Gale/ECCO
1735 Thomas Williams Murder of James
Beard
Friday, 14 March Unknown Unknown Gale
1737 Richard Coyle Murder of
Benjamin Hartley
Monday, 14 March Unknown Gibbeted Gallions
beyon Erith
OBO, Gale
1737 Edward Johnson Murder and Piracy Monday, 14 March Unknown Gibbeted Half Way
Tree
OBO, Gale
1737 Nicholas Williams Murder and Piracy Monday, 14 March Unknown Gibbeted Half Way
Tree
OBO, Gale
1737 Lawrence Sennett Murder and Piracy Monday, 14 March Unknown Gibbeted Gallions
beyon Erith
OBO, Gale
1738 John Richardson Murder of
Benjamin Hartley
Saturday, 28
January
Unknown Unknown OBO, Tried
with Richard
Coyle
1738 James Buchanan Murder of Michael
Smith
Wednesday, 20
December
Unknown Carried away Possibly
still alive,
escaped
abroad
OBO, Gale
1743 Thomas Rounce High Treason
(ghting on a
Spanish privateer)
Wednesday, 19
January
Unknown Interred By friends Gale
1744 Andrew Miller Murder of James
Nelson
December
1743
Monday, 21
February
Unknown Unknown OBO, Gale
(continued)
52 S. TARLOW
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1752 Captain James
Lowry
Murder of
Kenneth Hossack
Wednesday, 25
March
Unknown Gibbeted Galleons
below
Woolwich
ECCO, Gale
1754 John Lancey Destroyed the
Nightingale
Friday, 7 June Unknown Interred Gale
1759 Joseph Halsey Murder of John
Edwards
Wednesday, 14
March
Dissection Unknown Gale
1759 Nicholas Wingeld Piracy Wednesday, 28
March
Unknown Gibbeted Captain
Lowry’s
Gibbet
Gale
1759 Thomas Hide Piracy Wednesday, 28
March
Unknown Gibbeted Blackwall
Bridge
Gale
1759 William Lawrence Piracy Monday, 29
October
Wednesday, 19
December
Death Unknown HCA 1/61
1760 John Tune Piracy 28 March? Monday, 8
December
Death Gibbeted Unknown HCA 1/61
(OBO)
1762 Thomas Smith Piracy Tuesday, 30
March
Monday, 10 May Death Gibbeted Blackwall HCA 1/61,
Gale
1762 Robert Main Piracy Tuesday, 30
March
Monday, 10 May Death Gibbeted Blackwall HCA 1/61,
Gale
1767 John Winne Murder of a negro
sailor
Friday, 7
February
Tuesday, 10 March Dissection Unknown Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87
1769 Thomas Ailesbury Piracy and robbery Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Gibbeted Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
(continued)
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 53
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1769 Samuel Ailsbury Piracy and robbery Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Gibbeted Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1769 James Hide Piracy and robbery Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1769 William Geary Piracy and robbery Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1769 William Wenham Piracy and robbery Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1769 Edward Pinnell Sinking a Ship Tuesday, 31
October
Wednesday, 29
November
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1772 David Ferguson Murder of Peter
Thomas
Tuesday, 18
December
1771
Thursday, 3
January
Gibbeting/
dissection
Gibbeted Marshes by
the river
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87
1772 John Shoales Piracy 7 November
1771
Wednesday, 11
December
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87
1775 Thomas Sawyer Murder of William
Barbet
Wednesday, 8
November
Saturday, 14
November 1775
Gibbeting Unknown HCA 1/61
1781 William Townsend Murder and piracy Wednesday, 31
October
Saturday, 17
November
Death Dissection HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87
1781 James Sweetman Felony and Piracy Wednesday, 31
October
Tu. 4 December Gibbeting Gibbeted Kent Coast HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/87
Gale
(continued)
54 S. TARLOW
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1781 Matt Knight Felony and Piracy Wednesday, 31
October
Tu. 4 December Gibbeting Gibbeted Kent Coast HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/87
Gale
1781 William Paine Felony and Piracy Wednesday, 31
October
Tu. 4 December Gibbeting Gibbeted Norfolk
Coast
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/87
Gale
1784 Samuel Harris Murder of
John M’Neir
Thursday, 11
November
Saturday, 13
November
Death Gibbeted Blackwall HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1784 John North Murder of
John M’Neir
Thursday, 11
November
Saturday, 13
November
Death Gibbeted Blackwall HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/87,
GALE
1786 George Combes Murder of William
Allen
Saturday, 21
January
Monday, 23
January
Death Gibbeted Broad Ness
Point
HCA 1/61
Gale
1786 William Hines Piracy Saturday, 21
January
W/Thursday,
15/16 Feb.
Death Gibbeted Broad Ness
Point
HCA 1/61
Gale
1788 Henry Parsons Mutiny on the
“Ranger”
Monday, 12
November
1797
Monday, 14
January
Gibbeting Interred HCA 1/85
Gale
1788 George Steward Mutiny on the
“Ranger”
Monday, 12
November
1797
Monday, 14
January
Gibbeting Interred HCA 1/85
Gale
1788 Thomas Johnson Piracy against
“La Pourvoyeuse”
Monday, 12
November
1797
Monday, 14
January
Gibbeting Gibbeted Unknown HCA 1/85
Gale
1788 John Ross Piracy against
“La Pourvoyeuse”
Monday, 12
November
1797
Monday, 14
January
Gibbeting Interred HCA 1/85
Gale
(continued)
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 55
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1788 John Thompson Piracy against
“La Pourvoyeuse”
Monday, 12
November
1797
Monday, 14
January
Gibbeting Gibbeted Unknown HCA 1/85
Gale
1790 Thomas Brett Stole off the
“Dutch Hoy”
Monday, 30
November
1789
Monday, 4 January Death Gibbeted Between
Greeenwich
and Erith
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
Gale
John Williams Mutiny on the
“Gregson”
Monday, 30
November
1789
Monday, 4 January Death Gibbeted Between
Greeenwich
and Erith
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
Gale
Hugh Wilson Mutiny on the
“Gregson”
Monday, 30
November
1789
Monday, 4 January Death Gibbeted Between
Greeenwich
and Erith
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
Gale
John Clark Stole off the
“Lands End”
Monday, 30
November
1789
Monday, 4 January Death Gibbeted Between
Greeenwich
and Erith
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
Gale
Edward Hobbins Stole off the
“Lands End”
Monday, 30
November
1789
Monday, 4 January Death Gibbeted Between
Greeenwich
and Erith
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
Gale
1792 George
Hindmarsh
Murder of
Samuel Cowie
Friday, 8 June
1792
Friday, 6 July Dissection Dissection Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
Charles Berry Piracy and Felony
on the Fawy
Friday, 8 June
1792
Friday, 6 July Death Gibbeted Blackwall
Bridge
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
John Slacke Piracy and Felony
on the Fawy
Friday, 8 June
1792
Friday, 6 July Death Gibbeted Blackwall
Bridge
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1796 Francis Cole Murder of William
Little
Friday, 22
January
Thursday, 28
January
Dissection Unknown Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
Michael Blanche Murder of William
Little
Friday, 22
January
Thursday, 28
January
Dissection Unknown Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
(continued)
56 S. TARLOW
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
George Colley Murder of William
Little
Friday, 22
January
Thursday, 28
January
Dissection Unknown Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1798 George Jay Felony and Piracy Monday, 1
December
1797
Monday 5
March 1798
Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1799 Jean Prevost Murder of James
Wilcox
Friday, 20
December
Monday, 23
December
Dissection Unknown Surgeons
Hall
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1800 James Wilson Felony and Piracy Wednesday, 11
June
9th July Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1800 Thomas Potter (25) Murder Wednesday, 10
December
Thursday, 18
December
Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1802 William Codling
(45)
Destroying the
“Adventure”
Tuesday, 26
October
Saturday, 27
November
Death Interred Delivered
to friends
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1806 Andrew Akow (36) Murder on the
high seas
Friday, 11 July Friday, 18 July Dissection Dissected College,
32 Dukes
Street
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1809 Capt. John
Sutherland (46)
Murder
at sea of Richard
Wilson
Friday, 23 June Thursday, 29 June Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1812 Charles Palm Murder on the
high seas
Friday, 18
December
1812
Monday, 21
December
Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1812 Samuel Telling Murder on the
high seas
Friday, 18
December
1812
Monday, 21
December
Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1812 Thomas Young
Husband
Piracy Friday, 18
December
1812
Monday, 21
December
Death Unknown HCA 1/87
(continued)
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 57
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1812 William Jemott Felony and Piracy Friday, 28
February
N/A Death Transportation HCA 1/87
1813 John Bruce Murder on the
high seas
Wednesday,
16 December
1812
Monday, 4 January Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1813 John Wiltshire Felony and Piracy Monday, 5 July Friday, 30 July Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1814 Martin Hogan Murder Friday, 21
January
Monday, 24
January
Dissection Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1814 Manuel Amarro Stabbing Mark
Kirby
Friday, 1 July ? Guilty Unknown HCA 1/87
1814 Pootoo Murder on the
high seas
Tuesday, 13
December
Thursday, 15
December
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Gibbeted Essex/Kent
Coast
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1814 Moodie (14) Murder on the
high seas
Tuesday, 13
December
Thursday, 15
December
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Gibbeted Essex/Kent
Coast
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1814 Sootoe Murder on the
high seas
Tuesday, 13
December
Thursday, 15
December
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Gibbeted Essex/Kent
Coast
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1814 Cadern Murder on the
high seas
Tuesday, 13
December
Thursday, 15
December
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Gibbeted Essex/Kent
Coast
HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85,
HCA 1/112
1816 John Gillam Murder Monday, 22
January
Tuesday, 30
January
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Both? Kent Coast HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1816 William Brockman
(40)
Murder Monday, 22
January
Tuesday, 30
January
Dissection
then
Gibbeting
Both? Kent Coast HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
(continued)
58 S. TARLOW
Table 2.2 (continued)
Year of
execution
Name Crime Date of sentence Execution date Sentence Carried out? Where? Notes
1816 Robert Smith Murder at sea Monday, 18
November
Thursday, 21
November
Dissection/
Gibbeting
Unknown Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1816 Charles Furney Murder at sea Monday, 18
November
Thursday, 21
November
Dissection/
Gibbeting
Unknown Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1817 John Pierie Piracy Monday, 18
November
Tuesday, 7 January Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1817 Jonas Norburgh Piracy Monday, 18
November
Tuesday, 7 January Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1817 Daniel Brace Piracy Monday, 18
November
Tuesday, 7 January Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1817 William Hastings Piracy Monday, 18
November
Tuesday, 7 January Death Unknown HCA 1/61,
HCA 1/85
1820 James Pater Murder at sea Friday, 28
January
Tuesday, 1
February
Death Unknown HCA 1/61
1830 William Watts Piracy Thursday, 4
November
Thursday, 9
December
Death Unknown HCA 1/111
HCA 1/88
1830 George Davis Piracy Thursday, 4
November
Thursday, 9
December
Death Unknown HCA 1/111
HCA 1/88
1830 William Stevenson Piracy Thursday, 4
November
N/A Death
(commuted)
Transportation HCA 1/111
HCA 1/88
1830 Beveridge Piracy Thursday, 4
November
N/A Death
(commuted)
Transportation HCA 1/111
HCA 1/88
ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online; HCA, High Court of Admiralty; N/A, not available
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 59
carried out in London at Execution Dock, and the body then was moved
to a suitable place for display in a gibbet. The account of Captain James
Lowry’s execution in 1752 mentions that his body was conveyed by boat
from the scaffold at execution dock to ‘The Galleons’ (Galleons Reach
and Galleons Point are locations on the Thames, north of Woolwich)
where he was to be hung in chains.29 Some accounts record that Lowry’s
body was later stolen from his gibbet. Earlier in the eighteenth cen-
tury, the famous pirates Gow and Williams had been executed in 1726
at Execution Dock and their bodies subsequently displayed at Gray’s and
Blackwall, also locations along the Thames.
By custom, all those sentenced to death by the Admiralty courts were
hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. Following execution, bodies
were traditionally chained to a stake at low water until three tides had
washed over them, although this practice had apparently died out by the
late eighteenth century.30 Only after this water ritual were those who
were eventually to hang in chains taken from Wapping to a location fur-
ther down the Thames and gibbeted in a place that would be conspic-
uous to all river trafc entering or leaving London on the east. Those
sentenced to dissection were apparently subjected to a scaled-down ver-
sion of the three-tides punishment and left only until the water touched
their toes before being taken to the surgeons, presumably so that the
body was not spoiled by time or bloating.
William Clift, of the Royal College of Surgeons, himself painted the
scene of an Admiralty execution in 1816. The watercolour shows huge
crowds assembled on the Thames foreshore and on boats anchored in the
river, watching two gures on a scaffold. Interestingly, the scaffold itself is
erected well below the high water mark, and it looks as though it would
be possible for the bodies executed there to remain on their scaffold for
three high tides without being taken down and restaked in the river. It is
also clear that it would make no sense at all to take the bodies down only
in order to dip their feet in the water, when a couple of hours of waiting
29
The Monthly Chronologer. London Magazine, March 1752, p. 145.
30
T. Pennant London; or an abridgement of the celebrated Mr Pennant’s description of
the British capital and its environs (London, 1790), p. 157: “The criminals are to this day
executed on a temporary gallows, placed at low water mark; but the custom of leaving the
body to be overowed by three tides, has long since been omitted”.
60 S. TARLOW
would bring the river to their ankles anyway. This accords closely with
Pennant’s description of the gallows “placed at low water mark”.31
Smuggling was not a crime that was normally tried by the Admiralty
courts; instead, it usually came to ordinary assize courts or the Old
Bailey. Dyndor’s study of the location of the gibbets of the notorious
Hawkhurst gang of smugglers in Sussex and Kent notes that unlike most
murderers’ gibbets outside London, the men’s gibbets were not sited at
places of particular signicance in relation to the crimes for which they
were convicted. Instead, prominence seems to have been a key factor,
and gibbets were sited on topographical eminences such as Rook’s Hill
or Selsey Bill or by main roads. In East Sussex, the gibbets were more
likely to be sited close to the villages from which the criminals came.32
Liminality: The Symbolic Location of Gibbets
Archaeological studies of unusual burials, such as the deposition of
bodies in bogs in northern Europe from the Iron Age to the medieval
period, have often suggested that these burials are the remains of crimi-
nals whose deviancy is signalled in non-normative burial rites.33 A key
aspect of these interpretations is that the places of disposal of deviant
dead are liminal—boglands that are neither wet nor dry; foreshores that
are neither sea nor land. Similarly symbolic interpretations of later histor-
ical periods are not so common, but there is certainly an argument to be
made that gibbeting the criminal body symbolises its liminality and that
the enduring nature of the gibbeting process keeps it literally suspended
31
Pennant, London, p. 157; Anon. (1761) London and its environs described (London:
R. and J. Dodsley), p. 289. The copyright holder refused permission to publish this image
here.
32
Zoe Dyndor (2015) ‘The Gibbet in the Landscape: locating the criminal corpse in
mid-eighteenth-century England’, in R. Ward (ed.) A global History of Execution and the
Criminal Corpse (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
33
For bog bodies, see R.C. Turner and R. G. Scaife (1995) Bog Bodies: new discover-
ies and new perspectives (London: British Museum Press); P.V. Glob (1965) The Bog People:
Iron-age man preserved. Trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford (New York: Barnes and Noble).
For liminality in other forms of prehistoric burial, see Liv Nilsson Stutz (2014) ‘Mortuary
practices’ in V. Cummings, P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the
Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.
712–28.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 61
between worlds. It is neither buried nor alive; neither human nor thing;
and on occasions its landscape positioning also emphasises its liminal-
ity. It is not at a place, but by a road. In the case of shoreline gibbets
and Admiralty courts, it is at the boundary of land and sea. Whyte and
Coolen have both suggested that gibbets occur preferentially at parish or
other administrative boundaries.34
technology of the gibbet
Once a suitable location was identied, the erection of the gibbet scaf-
fold and the suspension of the gibbet cage had to take place swiftly. This
was not always easy. The Somerset sheriffs’ cravings mention two occa-
sions—in 1739 and 1746—when it was necessary to make holes in the
hard rock in order to erect the gibbet pole.35
The sheriff was responsible for arranging the erection of a gibbet pole
and for the manufacture of a gibbet cage and whatever hooks, chains or
other tackle were necessary to suspend the cage. In addition, a pulley or
temporary scaffolding would be needed to hoist the heavy iron contrap-
tion into position and secure it. In normal provincial practice, gibbets
were made for a single criminal and were not normally re-used.36 Since
a gibbeted criminal would be exhibited close to the scene of crime and
could remain in his gibbet for many decades, re-use was not normally
practical. The sheriff also had to arrange to transport the body from its
place of execution to the gibbet site and to organise security if the jour-
ney or the process was likely to attract unruly crowds.
34
J. Coolen (2014) ‘Places of justice and awe: the topography of gibbets and gallows in
medieval and early modern north-western and Central Europe’ World Archaeology 45(5),
pp. 762–79; Whyte ‘The deviant dead in the Norfolk landscape’.
35
Somerset Sheriffs’ Cravings (TNA T90/147/307 Stiling; T64/262 Williams and
Calway).
36
However, the gibbet irons in the London Docklands museum, which are not securely
provenanced but are likely to come from the riverside area and thus to relate to the
Admiralty courts, show two different styles of workmanship. The fact that this cage has
apparently been repaired suggests that it might have been re-used. It is possible that re-use
was normal for Admiralty gibbets. The other evidence for hanging chains by the Admiralty
courts is an image reproduced in Hartshorne, p. 77, showing a very skimpy rig: a simple
gusseted chain with a neck brace that would not have secured a body for very long at all.
The re-used gibbet and the basic chain are both exceptional designs and might relate to the
brief periods of hanging in chains practised by the Admiralty.
62 S. TARLOW
Typically, the body of a criminal was gibbeted within a day or two
of being executed, but sometimes there were longer intervals, espe-
cially when the body had to be transported some distance to the place
appointed for gibbeting. Pirates, for example, were usually hanged
at execution dock in London but might then be transported many
miles around the coast—to Devon or Norfolk, say—to be gibbeted.
Occasionally, the judge recognised the time needed to prepare for a
gibbeting. Thomas Nicholson, sentenced to execution and hanging in
chains at Cumberland Assizes on 22 August 1767, had the date of his
execution respited until 31 August in order to make the necessary prepa-
rations.37 Even so, that gave only just over a week to have the gibbet
irons made, a gibbet structure created and erected, and a location pre-
pared. Of the 38 cases for which the date of hanging in chains is explic-
itly stated in the records, 33 were gibbeted on the day of their execution.
The other ve executions took place between one and four days before
gibbeting, and all except one of these ve were transported at least 26
miles from the place of execution to the place of gibbeting, so the delay
probably is caused by the need to transport the body to the site where
the gibbet was erected. Where no separate date for gibbeting is given,
as in the majority of cases, it is probable that gibbeting most frequently
occurred on the day of execution (Table 2.3).
The Murder Act species that capital sentences for murder should be
carried out on the second day after conviction. A short interval between
sentencing and execution was considered important as a means of
increasing the dreadfulness of the punishment and thus its effectiveness
as a deterrent and of reducing the occurrence of last-minute pardons, or
at least the hope of a last-minute pardon. Henry Fielding believed the
great drawback of a long delay between sentencing and execution was
that the atrocity of the crime was less raw in the public mind and likely
to be overshadowed by the dreadfulness of the punishment.38 Since
the date of conviction is not always known, I have for the purposes of
Fig. 2.4 calculated the interval between the rst day of the assizes during
37
Assize Calendar Cumberland TNA E389/244/26, 26 August 1767.
38
G. R. Swanson 1990. ‘Henry Fielding and “a certain wooden edice” called the gal-
lows’, in W.B. Thesing (ed.) Executions and the British experience from the 17th to the 20th
century (Jefferson NC: McFarland and Co), 45–57.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 63
which a criminal was convicted and the date of his execution. Among
101 cases in England outside London recorded in the sheriffs’ cravings,
the mean interval was 10.71 days, although there was considerable vari-
ation around this (Fig. 2.4). The Berkshire assizes at which Abraham
Tull and William Hawkins were condemned began on 7 March 1787
and they were executed and gibbeted on the 9th—only two days later,
or even one day if their case was not heard on the rst day of the assize
sitting. Thomas Colley, on the other hand, was tried at the Hertfordshire
assizes beginning on 29 July 1751 but not executed and gibbeted until
24 August, nearly a month later. Delays of more than two weeks, how-
ever, are uncommon. Given that the start of assizes is likely to be before
the date of conviction in many cases (assize sittings could take up to a
week in this period), we can assume that the blacksmith would normally
have a week or less to make a set of irons.
It was necessary therefore to start on the construction of a gibbet and
a set of irons as soon as possible after a sentence had been passed. Where
possible, the condemned man was measured for his set of irons before
execution, a harrowing experience. When Ralph Smith of Lincolnshire
was being measured for his irons in 1792, for example, he found it
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
one to
three
four to
six
seven to
nine
ten to
twelve
thirteen
to fifteen
sixteen
to
eighteen
nineteen
to twenty
one
twenty
two to
twenty
four
twenty
five to
twenty
seven
Fig. 2.4 Interval in days between the rst day of the assizes during which a
criminal was convicted and the date of his execution
64 S. TARLOW
impossible to retain the composure he had exhibited during sentencing,
according to a contemporary newspaper report.39
Even with the ability to start making the gibbet irons while the
condemned man was still alive, there could be considerable time pres-
sure. Moreover, careful measuring of the body to be enclosed was not
always possible, and sometimes the condemned man resisted this horri-
ble reminder of his imminent fate. Thus, despite attempts to make the
gibbet irons adjustable, designs were not always successful: in 1750, the
London Evening Post records that the body of John Barchard had to be
taken back to the gaol after his execution while the gibbet irons were
altered, “they proving too little” (29 September 1750). Some gibbet
Table 2.3 Surviving gibbet cages
Date Name County Present location
1720? Siôn Y Gof Powys St Fagan’s Museum of Welsh
Life
1731 Keal Lincs Louth Museum
1742 Breeds Sussex Rye Town Hall
Late 18th century? Anon London Museum of London
Docklands
1777? Hill? Hampshire Winchester Westgate
1785 Cliffen Norfolk Norwich Castle Museum
1786 Matcham Huntingdonshire St Ives Museum
1787 Tull or Hawkins Berkshire Reading Museum
1791 Miles Lancs Warrington Museum
1794 Nicholls Suffolk Moyses Hall Museum, Bury
St Edmunds
1795 Watson Norfolk Norwich Castle Museum
1795 Quin or Culley Cambs Wisbech and Fenland
Museum
1806 Otter (Temporell) Lincs Doddington Hall
1832 Jobling Northumberland South Shields Museum (pos-
sible replica)
1832 Cook Leics Nottingham Galleries of
Justice (replica in Leicester
Guildhall)
39
Lloyds Evening Post, 21–23 March 1792, issue 5419.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 65
contraptions were so basic that the size or shape of the corpse made lit-
tle difference. Hartshorne (1891: 77) shows ‘a Thames pirate’ suspended
in what is apparently a single chain with a gusset passing between the
legs and a brace around the neck to keep the body upright (Fig. 2.5). It
would be easy to remove a body from such a rig, nor would it keep the
Fig. 2.5 A Thames pirate (from Hartshorne Hanging in Chains)
66 S. TARLOW
body together for long once decay began to accelerate, so such a design
could not have been a very successful gibbet for the long term. Surviving
gibbet cage structures show that they were often constructed so as to be
adjustable to t the size and shape of the particular body they came to
enclose. On the Keal gibbet at Louth, for example, both the belt bands
and the long straps are punched several times so that the framework
could be extended or contracted and bolted into place to t support-
ively close to the body. In the collection of Reading museum, a similar
design is evident on the leg iron of Tull or Hawkins’s gibbet, which can
be tightened to suit the circumference of the leg (Fig. 2.6). Although
some gibbet cages, like James Cook’s of Leicester, have rigid, hinged
hoops, others allow for some degree of shaping to the criminal’s body.
Only a small part of Gervase Matcham’s gibbet survives at Norris House
museum, St Ives: part of what is probably a belt, made of a series of ve
Fig. 2.6 Tull or Hawkins’s leg iron, courtesy of Reading Museums (photo:
Sarah Tarlow)
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 67
curved and hinged plates which probably would have conformed quite
closely to the shape and size of the condemned man’s waist.
Usually the tting of the irons is not described in the sources, but occa-
sionally the cravings mention a cost for having the smith attend the exe-
cution in order to t the irons afterwards. The account of John Curtis’s
hanging in chains in Wiltshire in 1764 mentions that the smith who made
the chains was also responsible for tting them and was paid to travel to
the execution for this purpose.40 When Rider Haggard discovered the
remains of the gibbet and skeleton of Stephen Walton while digging on
West Bradenham common, Norfolk, he noticed that the skull had clear
scorch marks where it had been burned by a hot iron, thus proving to
Rider Haggard that the man must have been dead when enclosed in his
gibbet cage and to us that the smith on that occasion tted the gibbet
by soldering or welding.41 The fact that newspapers commented on the
return of John Barchard’s body to the gaol after his execution so that
the irons could be re-sized suggests that normally the irons were tted
directly after and at the scene of execution.42 This also constitutes circum-
stantial evidence that tarring the body was not normally practised, or was
a very quick and easy process, since it is hard to see how a corpse could be
stripped, immersed in tar, redressed and tted into irons in a very short
time and at the foot of the scaffold.
The poles from which the cages were hung were often very high—10
metres or more, which discouraged attempts to rescue the body or to steal
the gibbet—and supported chains which comprised a substantial quantity
of iron. The post was also sometimes tted with spikes around the bottom
to make it hard to scale. The gibbet post of Adam Graham, executed in
1748 and hung in chains on Kingmoor, Carlisle, was apparently 12 yards
40
TNA T90/155, Sheriff’s Cravings.
41
H. Rider Haggard (1899) A Farmer’s Year (London: Longman’s, Green and Co),
p. 355. Sadly, no scorch marks are evident on the skull fragments which are held today
by Norwich Castle Museum, but this may be due to over-zealous cleaning shortly after
acquisition.
42
However, the Old England Journal for 28 January 1749 records that the bodies of
smugglers Comby, Hammond, Carter and Tapner were returned to the gaol after their
execution in order to be hung in chains, which could indicate that the tting of the gib-
bet cages was done at the gaol. The body of a fth man, their partner Jackson, was already
at the gaol, where he had died two hours after being sentenced to hang in chains, being
“so terribly frightened”. It is not possible to say from the newspaper report whether the
untimely end of Jackson altered the normal course or location of tting the irons.
68 S. TARLOW
high and had 12,000 nails in it to prevent it being scaled or cut down
to remove the body.43 The sheriffs’ cravings for Hampshire in 1761 note
that when Francis Arsine was hung in chains the gibbet was “20 feet high
made of very strong timber and secured with nails to prevent its being cut
down and [tted with] a secure set of chains”. Several London gibbet-
ing accounts (in the sheriffs’ cravings) make reference to “plating the gib-
bet”. The fairly detailed accounts for the gibbeting of Thomas Willot in
Staffordshire in 1739 include “timber for the gibbet 28 foot long (being
7 yards or thereabout above ground) and cross pieces and carriage there
of workmanship of the timber and erecting the gibbet and lining gibbet
on each side with bars of iron”. Similarly, the cravings account for the gib-
bet of William Corbett (executed in Surrey in 1764) itemises “the gibbet
made strong with iron to prevent it being cut”.
The gibbet pole seems almost always to have been made from timber,
although sometimes the cravings specify that the timber is “strong” or
note that nails or iron bars or plates, as discussed above, should reinforce
the main post. The sheriff who commissioned the three-armed gibbet
erected for the bodies of Drury, Barker and Lesley in Warwickshire in
1765 lists “materials of stone and timber” for the gibbet, but stone is not
usually mentioned in connection with a gibbet, and there is no indica-
tion of what its role was to be—perhaps to construct a strong socket for
the post. A broken socket stone at Gonerby Hill Foot, Lincolnshire, is
believed locally to have supported a gibbet at one time.44
Extant Gibbets
I have been able to discover the whereabouts of only 16 extant gibbet
cages, despite a thorough literature and online search and an appeal on
national radio. The majority of gibbets seem to have disappeared. Those
gibbets that do exist are in a variety of styles. The surviving evidence is
considered briey here45:
43
Hartshorne Hanging in Chains, pp. 66–67.
44
http://www.lincstothepast.com/photograph/290331.record?pt=S.
45
See Sarah Tarlow (2014) ‘The technology of the gibbet’ International Journal of
Historical Archaeology 18: 668–99 for a fuller discussion. The chains at Weston Park
museum, Shefeld, catalogued as Spence Broughton’s gibbeting chains are in fact restrain-
ing chains and manacles, and another set of chains, perhaps horse furniture. They do not
resemble any other gibbet irons and are not included in Table 2.3.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 69
These gibbets show a variety of forms. Some have hooped extensions
for arms and legs, others for legs only, and John Keals’s gibbet at Louth
has only a headpiece and torso, from which the arms and legs would
have dangled. Figure 2.7 shows some different styles of gibbet.
The Necessary Functions of a Gibbet
What functions must an effective set of irons full? First, it must contain
the body and prevent it from either falling out or being removed, while
at the same time still maximising its visibility. In order to do this, most
gibbet cages were designed to t closely to the body, allowing as much
as possible of the body to be seen, while ensuring that the gaps between
bars were too small to remove it. When possible, the prisoner was meas-
ured for his irons before execution, but there were other means of ensur-
ing a close t, notably construction with punched straps and hoops that
could be adjusted to size by riveting (Fig. 2.8). Bodies in advanced decay
would necessarily have fallen through the framework in pieces, although
the skull, if unbroken, might remain in the headpiece, as in the case
of John Breeds at Rye or Sion y Gôf at Dylife (Fig. 2.9). In addition,
small pieces of the body could easily be removed by animals or birds.
However, by adding to the horror of the gibbeted body, such removals
did not diminish the power of the spectacle. In fact, the power of carrion
birds around the gibbet to augment the horror was exploited in artistic
depictions of the gibbet (Fig. 2.10).
Strength and security seem to have been the most valued and dis-
cussed features of a good gibbet. The cravings often describe the gib-
bet as “strong” and sometimes specify the necessity of making theft
of the body impossible. The sheriffs’ cravings for Berkshire 1738,
for example, mention that the irons of John Sturabout cost £7 and
7 shillings “to prevent [his body] being stolen wherein much iron
and workmanship is required”. The cravings related to the gibbetings
of David Anderson (1736) and William Fairall (1749) in Kent both
make explicit reference to the need for security. Anderson’s gibbet was
“built in a strong manner and led with nails and braced with iron
to prevent the same from being cut down”, and Fairall’s gibbet was
also riveted with iron to prevent his fellow smugglers from cutting
70 S. TARLOW
Fig. 2.7 Some different styles of gibbet: a: John Breeds (Rye, 1743, now in
Rye town hall); b: John Keal (Louth, 1731, now in Louth Museum); c: possibly
‘Jack the Painter’ (Portsmouth, 1777, now in Winchester Museum); James Cook
(Leicester, 1832, replica now in Leicester Guildhall). All photos: Sarah Tarlow
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 71
Fig. 2.8 Multiple
punches holes on John
Keal’s gibbet (photo:
Sarah Tarlow)
Fig. 2.9 Headpiece
of John Breeds’s gibbet
with large skull fragment
remaining (photo: Sarah
Tarlow)
72 S. TARLOW
him down.46 The journalist for the Daily Courant47 who reported
on John Naden’s hanging in chains in Staffordshire was impressed
by the chains, made by somebody from Birmingham “in so curious
a Manner, that they will keep his Bones together till they turn to
Powder, if the Iron will last so long”.
Second, the gibbet cage must be conspicuous. This was achieved largely
through the use of a tall pole and advantageous siting (sometimes tak-
ing advantage of a natural or archaeological eminence such as a hillock or
barrow) adjacent to well-used public roads. The successful cage should
make the body more visible and more terrible to onlookers. The gibbet
cage must contribute to the awe of the spectacle by allowing the body to
be seen and permitting some limited movement. If this also caused the
Fig. 2.10 Artistic representation of a gibbet with carrion birds. Vignette from
Thomas Bewick’s British Birds (1804)
46
TNA T90/147/256 Sturabout; T90/147/118 Anderson; T64/262 Fairall.
47
Daily Courant, 13 September 1731.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 73
chains to creak or clang, so much the better. The Reverend Charles Hardy
remembered an occasion in about 1837, driving over West Bradenham
Common at night when his horse began to “plunge violently” and he
heard a sound above his head: “Clink, clank; clink, clank; clink, clank”. His
servant told him it was the sound of a gibbet “on which the iron cap and
collar of the man, who had been hanged, was swinging to and fro in the
October breeze, producing the ghastly sound”.48
Third, the gibbet cage had to be durable. The body was supposed to
remain up there until it had decayed, and as there was no particular time
for taking it down, many gibbets remained in their location for decades.
Heavy iron was invariably used for the cage. The condition of surviving
gibbets is testament to their durability, especially since many of them had
been hanging outside for many decades, often followed by a period of
burial in wet ground.
Fourth, it had to be possible to construct a gibbet cage quickly. As
we have seen, less than a week was available to design and construct the
full kit in most cases. The smith had to work together with a carpenter
(whose job it was to make the wooden pole), to ensure that the gib-
bet was securely erected in time for the arrival of the body, and then to
encase the body in its irons and probably to oversee its suspension.
Fifth, while being durable and secure, the gibbet cage also had to be
light enough to hoist on a gibbet post which could be around ten metres
high and not so solid that the visibility of the body was in any way
impeded. The criminal on the gibbet should be recognisable to those
who had known him in life.
Gibbet Technology and the Absence of Tradition
Gibbeting required a pole/scaffold, a length of chain, and a gibbet cage
or suit. The sheriffs’ cravings normally bundle all these costs together,
but sometimes they specify the recipient of the money and the nature
of their job. For example, John Bowland’s gibbet, commissioned in
48
Hardy’s work, Social England from eighty years ago to the present jubilee year, is cited by
C.M. in the Norfolk Chronicle of 1897 (30 January 1897). This must have been Watson’s
gibbet of 1795, despite C.M.’s stated belief that a gibbet of such a date would not be
standing in the later 1830s. In fact, many gibbets are known to have been still standing
fty years or more after their erection.
74 S. TARLOW
Rutland in 1769, cost £5, 15s, 6d for the “set of iron chains”, paid to
John Fox, a blacksmith, and £6, 2s, 6d for the construction and erection
of the wooden gibbet frame, paid to John Wyhters, a carpenter.
The gibbet cage is an unusual artefact. It is comparatively rare—out
of only a couple of hundred (at most) that formerly existed in Britain,
only a handful are known. The infrequency of its manufacture makes it
unusual also. Blacksmiths in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries generally made few forms—agricultural implements, craft tools,
household objects and farriery (horse-shoeing and horse tack). These
artefacts were learned during long apprenticeships and conform to local
traditions.49 By contrast, a gibbet was needed so infrequently that it was
not a form within the learned repertoire of most blacksmiths. Moreover,
it was needed almost immediately and so left the blacksmith little time
to experiment or research other models. Therefore, each blacksmith
needed to design a gibbet effectively from scratch. This constant reinven-
tion of the gibbet iron is evident in the proliferation of designs and in the
absence of clear typological logic by either region or time period, even
though such typologies are observable in other, more frequently made,
products of the blacksmith’s craft. The range of designs identied repre-
sent independent and idiosyncratic responses to the problem of designing
a framework which would enable the range of functions identied above.
the ‘cArnivAl’ of the gibbet
Huge crowds are commonly reported in the days immediately following
the erection of a gibbet. At least 2000 people are supposed to have visited
the scene of Benstead’s gibbet on Undley Common, Suffolk on a single
day in 1792, and maybe 200 of them made a special ferry crossing in order
to visit the site.50 A similar number was estimated to have attended the
gibbeting of Robert and William Drewitt on North Heath Common in
1799; on that occasion, the spectators were accommodated in booths “as
49
J. Bailey (1977) The Village Blacksmith (Princes Risborough: Shire); E. J. T. Collins
(1996) ‘Agricultural hand-tools and the industrial revolution’, in N. Harte and R. Quinault
(eds.), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
pp. 57–77.
50
World, April 1792, issue 1651.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 75
at a horse race or cricket match”.51 Such numbers, however, were dwarfed
by the estimated 40,000 who attended the rst day of Spence Broughton’s
gibbeting near Shefeld or William Smith’s on Finchley Common.
What did the gibbet crowd experience? Between the expectation that
they would have been unanimously awed and chastened by the spectacle
of ignominy and the revisionist position that they subverted the theatre
of humiliation, there is a wide spectrum of possible reactions. Gatrell’s
critique of Laqueur’s posited “carnival” of the scaffold questions the idea
that the crowd rather than the State was in control of the scaffold experi-
ence.52 While potentially subversive and “carnivalesque” elements were
undoubtedly present at the scene of an execution, the disapproval with
which such scenes were described in the contemporary press suggests
that it should not be seen as normative behaviour. Gatrell’s comments on
Laqueur refer only to the scene of execution. How far their debate could
be relevant to subsequent hanging in chains will be discussed further in
the conclusion. There was no doubt a big difference between visiting a
gibbet at or shortly after its erection and encountering a gibbet months
or years later. There is no doubt that for many people the gibbet repre-
sented simply another destination for a day out. Stephen Monteage of
London recorded in his diary for the 16 September 1733: “In the after-
noon took a walk with my wife, Mrs Tickling and pretty little Salley to
the men in chains upon Stanford Hill”.53
If the criminal was sufciently notorious and interest in his gib-
bet was great, there was good money to be made from playing to these
crowds. The landlord of The Arrow on Clifton Lane next to Attercliffe
Common, South Yorkshire, where Spence Broughton was gibbeted,
boasted that he had made enough money from the beer sold in the
rst few days of his exhibition that he was able to retire. A description
of the gibbet of William Smith on Finchley Common in 1782 remarks
that the 40,000 people who came to view the body the Sunday after his
51
Evening Mail, 17–19 April 1799.
52
Gatrell The Hanging Tree, pp. 90–105, commenting on T.W. Laqueur (1989)
‘Crowds, carnivals and the English State in English executions, 1604–1868’, in A.L.
Beier et al. (eds.) The First Modern Society: essays in honour of Lawrence Stone. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 305–99.
53
LMA CLC/479/MS00205/001-009.
76 S. TARLOW
execution were well fed. Sausages, fried under the gibbet, were availa-
ble to the more rened class of people who arrived in coaches, chariots
and phaetons while the lower ranks, presumably arriving on foot, were
sold gin and gingerbread.54 A similar number apparently attended the
Derbyshire gibbet of Anthony Lingard on its rst day, and the local vicar,
nding nearly all of his parishioners absent from church, decided instead
to give his sermon at the site of the gibbet.55
A recently erected gibbet seems often to have attracted a carnival
crowd which did not always earn the moral approval of the press. The
scene at the gibbets of Peter Conoway and Michael Richardson on Bow
Common, London in 1770 were widely reported. Several journals dis-
approved of the erection of drinking booths and the disorderly behav-
iour of the “mob” at the site. The General Evening Post described how
“Several people have climbed up the gibbet, and some of them have
taken the caps from the malefactors’ faces. One fellow had the hard-
ness to call out ‘Conoway, you and I have often smoked a pipe together,
and so shall we again’ on which, to no small diversion to the mob, he
climbed up the gibbet with two lighted pipes, one of which he stuck in
Conoway’s mouth, and the other he smoked as he sat across the gal-
lows”.56 The Public Advertiser, meanwhile, opined that the behaviour of
the crowd “must give foreigners a shocking idea of the manners of the
English” and was appalled that “what is intended as a public example
should be treated as a matter of public festivity”.57
The size of the crowds at the scene of the gibbet fuelled middle-class
anxieties about crime and unrest. Robert Hazlitt, hung in chains near
Newcastle in 1770 for robbing the mail, expressed shortly before death
the desire that his death and display would be “useful to mankind”, pre-
sumably as a warning against criminal behaviour.58 However, the proxim-
ity of the gibbet seems not to have had a reliably deterrent effect on the
criminally minded. In 1826, John Lingard was convicted of assault and
robbery committed within sight of the gibbet containing the bones of
54
Public Advertiser, 30 April 1782, issue 14927.
55
C. Drewry (2007) Wormhill: history of a High Peak village (Little Longstone: Ashridge
Press).
56
2–4 August 1770, issue 5744.
57
Public Advertiser, 6 August, issue 11111; 24 July, issue 11106.
58
John Sykes, Local Records, vol. 1.
2 HOW TO HANG IN CHAINS: HOW, WHERE AND WHEN … 77
his brother Anthony, executed eleven years earlier.59 Nor was this the rst
serious crime to have been committed at that scene: in 1819, 16-year-old
Hannah Bocking chose the road near Lingard’s gibbet as the location to
give poisoned cakes to Jane Grant, a young woman of her own age who
had been offered a job for which Bocking had been turned down.60 For
this crime, Bocking herself was executed and dissected. The same year
the Shefeld Iris reported a robbery near Attercliffe, pointing out that the
“daring offender must have passed through the eld in which is the gib-
bet of the notorious Spence Broughton”.61
The Curative Power of the Gibbeted Man
Gibbeted bodies not only were magnets for fairs and wild behaviour
but also were the unlikely subjects of eighteenth-century medical tour-
ism, sought for their curative and totemic value as sources of healing.
The touch of the dead man’s hand was believed to cure various diseases
and, in former times, had even been recommended by orthodox medical
authorities such as William Harvey.62 There are several accounts of peo-
ple visiting gibbets specically to stroke the affected parts of their bod-
ies with the dead man’s hand. In 1799, two young women “of genteel
appearance” came to the gibbets of Robert and William Drewitt on North
Heath in order to have their necks stroked by the hand of one of the dead
men in order to cure their scrofula.63 In the ensuing months, many peo-
ple travelled to the site of the gibbet with their children in order to hold
them up towards the body of Robert Drewitt, who was widely believed to
have been wrongly executed, to have his hand passed over their throats.
A newspaper search revealed 27 instances of curative uses of the hanged
man’s hand between 1758 and 1863.64 It is mostly the newly hanged
59
The Derby Mercury, 22 March 1826, issue 4889.
60
Taylor. May the Lord have mercy on your soul, p. 40.
61
Shefeld Iris, 6 April 1818. Thanks to Chris Williams for drawing this report to the
attention of the research project.
62
W. Pagel (1976) New light on William Harvey (Basel: S. Karger) p. 50.
63
Courier and Evening Gazette, 24 April 1799, issue 2088.
64
O. Davies and F. Matteoni (2015) ‘A virtue beyond all medicine’: The Hanged Man’s
Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England.
Social History of Medicine.
78 S. TARLOW
man’s hand that was sought after, while still hanging from the scaffold on
which the execution had taken place. Touching the hand of a gibbeted
criminal must have been challenging, given the height of the post and the
rigid design of many cages. The curative use of the bodies of the Drewitt
brothers was, in that sense, unusual, and it is possible that the particular
draw of those bodies related to the availability of a ladder or a particularly
accessible set of irons or both, although such a suggestion is purely specu-
lative. In other ways, however, the gibbet, and the bones contained within
it, continued to have power over the bodies, minds and landscapes of the
living for many decades, as we shall see in Chap. 3.
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79
CHAPTER 3
The Afterlife of the Gibbet
© The Author(s) 2017
S. Tarlow, The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain,
Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-60089-9_3
Abstract Gibbets could remain standing for many decades. Some were
removed because their presence was objectionable; others were eventu-
ally brought down by time and the weather. Sometimes, bodies were sto-
len. Folklore was attached to the locations of gibbets and to the remains
which stayed there, and often the names of gibbeted criminals are still
attached to places in their landscapes. Parts of the gibbet and of the
bodies themselves were collected and curated, sometimes for utilitarian
or scientic purposes but often just as curiosities. The case of Eugene
Aram’s skull is a case in point.
Keywords Afterlives · Folklore · Body parts · Phrenology
how long did the gibbet remAin?
There was no minimum or maximum specied time for a gibbet to remain
standing, and they could remain in situ for anything between three days
and more than a century. Whereas some were deliberately removed
because of the nuisance caused by visitors or because of the offensive-
ness of the sight and smell of the remains, others stayed in their gibbets
until time or weather brought them down. A body that had not been
embalmed or otherwise articially preserved would normally have decayed
fully within a few months in the open air, but some bodies became natu-
rally desiccated and survived, entire or in part, for many years. The gib-
bets of James Price and Thomas Brown, for example, erected on Trafford
80 S. TARLOW
Green in 1796, were taken down in 1818, at which time apparently not
only nearly all the skeletons remained but also some soft tissue was still
surviving.1 Gibbet cages were normally designed to hold the body quite
securely, but as connective tissue decayed, most elements would fall out of
the irons. The exception is the skull which was too large to slip between
the bars and so is sometimes found still in its position. John Breeds’s
skull remains inside his gibbet irons, held at Rye town hall. The skull of
Edward Corbet, gibbeted on Bierton Common, Buckinghamshire, in
1773 was still visible in his gibbet in 1795 when a correspondent of the
Bucks Herald noted it during a visit to the Bierton feast. Corbet’s gibbet
eventually fell when the action of the swivel eroded the attachment and it
fell into a ditch.2
By the 1830s, the duration of gibbeting had become much shorter—
for various reasons. The body of William Jobling, gibbeted in 1832 at
Jarrow Slake, near South Shields, was removed without authorisa-
tion within three weeks of his execution, supposedly by his relatives or
friends, although nobody was ever tried for the offence of removing his
body, which, in theory, could result in a sentence of transportation.3
James Cook, the last man to be gibbeted in England, was executed in
Leicester in August 1832, about a week after Jobling. His body was
removed only four days after being suspended, following an applica-
tion to the Secretary of State. In Cook’s case, although the correspond-
ence is not published, comment in the newspapers of the time suggests
that it was a combination of the huge crowds and the associated pos-
sibility of disorder, combined with distaste for the exhibition of cadavers
which motivated the removal of the body. The Leicester and Nottingham
Journal for 18 August 1832 commented,
1
Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, 2 May 1818, issue 881.
2
Andrews Bygone punishments, pp. 56–57.
3
York Herald and General Advertiser, 8 September 1832, issue 3131 contains the news
that his body had been stolen and supposedly buried in the sand. There is more to this than
rst appears. The Leicester Chronicle; or, Commercial and Agricultural Advertiser adum-
brated on 11 August 1832, issue 1142, “It is supposed, however, that [Jobling’s] fellow
workmen will very soon remove [his body] and bury it in some private place … In the act
of parliament ordering murderers’ bodies of [sic] to be hung in chains, there is a clause
inicting the punishment of transportation for seven years upon all who may be guilty of
stealing the body from the gibbet”.
3 THE AFTERLIFE OF THE GIBBET 81
We have heard several reasons given for the interment of Cook’s body, but
as the Secretary of State’s letter has not been published, we can give no
positive information on the subject. One cause that we have heard assigned
is, that should murders be as frequent within the next twelve years as they
have been during the same time gone by, the county would be frightfully
studded with such exhibitions, and there being now little waste land except
by the side of roads, they must necessarily prove a great annoyance to the
inhabitants residing in the villages. However, be the cause what it may, we
are glad that the disgusting sight has been removed considering it, as we
do, the revival of a barbarous custom which a more humanized age has
long exploded from the statute book.
when And why did A gibbet come down?
In the absence of any legally specied term for which the body must
remain on the gibbet, bodies were generally left until weather, land
development or time brought them down. However, there were a num-
ber of reasons why a body might be taken down sooner. Local resi-
dents sometimes petitioned the sheriff or judge to have a body removed
shortly after the gibbeting, and the residents had to give reasons for this.
Such reasons divide broadly into two categories: that the gibbet was itself
noisome and distasteful, and offended the sensibilities of those who lived
or travelled nearby, and that the visitors attracted to the gibbet caused
disturbance to the local area.
Concerns of the rst kind motivated the complaints about the body
of Samuel Hurlock which, in 1747, was removed from its location at
Stamford Hill “on Account of the Heat, the Stench of his Body being a
Nuisance to the Inhabitants of the Neighbourhood” and placed instead
on common land off the Tottenham turnpike.4 Similar concerns were
later made about, for example, Thomas Watkin’s gibbet near Windsor
(1764) and Jenkin Prothero’s near Bristol (1783):
On Monday last the body of Watkins the Gardener, who was lately
executed at Windsor, and hung in chains for the murder of Miss
4
Old England, 15 August 1747.
82 S. TARLOW
Hammersley’s servant maid, was removed from the road side where it
hung, and the gibbet erected on the banks of the River, on a complaint
that it was a nuisance to the passengers.5
Jenkin William Prothero was hanged for murder in 1783 and the judge
specied that his body be hung in chains on Durdham Down, Bristol.
However, the local inhabitants petitioned the Royal court that the body
be moved, and the sheriff of Gloucester was ordered to nd a new spot
for Prothero’s gibbet or to send his body for dissection. The petitioners
particularly suggest that the spectacle was revolting to those who sought
out the hot wells adjacent to the Down and that the gibbet was “placed
so near the back part of the dwelling house of a widow woman who used
to let an apartment in the summer season to persons of decent repute
from Bristol that it will be injurious to her”.6 The fact that this letter was
sent to the sheriff conrms that it was he who normally had responsibil-
ity for organising the location of the gibbet. Where the proposed loca-
tion was on private land, however, the sheriff could proceed only with
the permission of the landowner. In the case of the Washwood Heath
gibbet, the sheriff omitted this crucial step, and the complaint went
directly to the judge.
In 1781, murderers John Hammond and Thomas Pitmore were hung
in chains on a shared gibbet on Birmingham’s Washwood Heath. The
crowds of people attending the gibbeting and visiting the structure after-
wards had disturbed a rabbit warren and thus compromised the war-
rener’s livelihood, argued local petitioners, seeking to have the gibbet
removed or relocated.7 As additional argument, the petitioners men-
tioned the visibility of the gibbet from both Erdington Hall and Aston
Hall, illustrating another common factor in the deliberate removal of
gibbets: that they offended the sensibilities of polite people. The gibbets
of Abraham Tull and William Hawkins in Berkshire were taken down
and buried at the request of a local lady. William Andrews recorded
that “Mrs. Brocas, of Beaurepaire, then residing at Wokeeld Park, gave
5
St James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 24–26 May 1764, issue 503. His hang-
ing in chains in Gallows Lane near Windsor was reported in the Public Advertiser on 13
March 1764. A warrant issued by Judge Wilmot on 30 June 1764 orders the removal
of the gibbet and body of Watkins to be hung up again at Churgreen, a mile and a half
beyond Windsor towards Reading (TNA E389/243/620).
6
TNA E389/247/185.
7
TNA DD/E/208/15, DD/E/208/16, T90/163.
3 THE AFTERLIFE OF THE GIBBET 83
private orders for them to be taken down in the night and buried, which
was accordingly done. During her daily drives she passed the gibbeted
men and the sight greatly distressed her”.8
Anthony Lingard’s gibbet was taken down by the Duke of Devonshire
in response to complaints from local people about the noise the rattling
bones (and presumably creaking chains) made.9 The noise of the gibbet’s
“creaking cage and bleaching bones” was also noted in relation to an
encounter with Spencer’s gibbet at Scrooby toll bar, Nottinghamshire,
which was erected in 1779 and apparently still visible in 1846.10
In 1799, the gibbet of a man called John Haines was controversially
sited on Hounslow Heath, occasioning some spirited discussion in the
newspapers. The Whitehall Evening Post complained that it was situ-
ated too close to the road; the Oracle and Daily Advertiser agreed that
its effect was only “to frighten women and poison travellers”; and the
Morning Post and Advertiser reported that the royal family were now
travelling by a different road to avoid the spectacle. Only the Morning
Herald demurred, claiming that it was 500 yards from the road and
not in sight of any house: a claim made rather suspect by the Morning
Chronicle’s report that on the night of 16 March the body in its irons
was blown from the gibbet into the garden of a nearby house.11
theft of bodies from gibbets
Despite the possibility of being sentenced to up to seven years’ transporta-
tion if caught removing a body from its gibbet, friends and relatives of the
deceased sometimes attempted rescue. The bodies of Andrew Burnet and
Henry Payne, gibbeted at Durdham Down near Bristol, disappeared from
their irons a month after their executions in 1744 but were found hidden
in some rocks and hung up again. One can only suppose that their rescuers
were disturbed or interrupted by the coming of daylight and attempted to
8
William Andrews Bygone Punishments, p. 63.
9
Ebenezer Rhodes (1822) Peak Scenery; a letter from Jeffrey Rackett dated 22 March
1826 requesting the gibbet’s removal survives in TNA (HO 44/16/25—f25).
10
Robert Mellors (1920) Scrooby: The Archbishops’ Palace, and the Pilgrim Fathers
(Nottingham: J. and H. Bell).
11
Whitehall Evening Post, 12–14 March 1799, issue 8056; Oracle and Daily Advertiser,
26 March 1799, issue 941; Morning Herald, 15 March 1799, issue 5769; Morning
Chronicle, 19 March 1799, issue 9304.
84 S. TARLOW
conceal the bodies rather than risk being caught with them.12 The body
of Walter Kidson, also hung in chains in Gloucestershire, on Stourbridge
Common, in September 1773, was stolen two years after his execution.
The London Chronicle of 19 September 1775 (issue 2931) reports that the
gibbet was sawn off at the neck and the body removed. Gloucestershire
seems to have had an unusual number of gibbet raiders, for it was also in
this county that the bodies of Thomas and Henry Dunsden were removed
from their gibbets and taken away, on the same night that the lodge of one
of the local keepers was raided and a number of deerskins stolen.13
In London, in 1759, a body in its irons was stolen from execution
dock, where the Admiralty gibbets were located,14 and a few years later
all the gibbets along the Edgware Road were cut down during a single
night. This was probably an act of vandalism rather than an attempted
rescue, since bodies were left lying in their chains on the road.15 In
1786, the body of another Admiralty convict—George Coombes, hung
in chains at Boar Ness Point, Kent—was stolen, and the Admiralty
offered a £50 reward for information leading to the apprehension of
those responsible.16
In Lincolnshire, the body of Philip Hooton, hung in chains on
Sureet Common in 1769, was stolen about a week after it had gone
up, and apparently it was rumoured to have been thrown into the sea.
The Leicester and Nottingham Journal of 18 March 1769 reported
that a reward of £500 had been offered for apprehending those who
had stolen the body. Despite the offer of this enormous sum, there is
no record of any arrest for this crime. The person who removed the
body of John Croxford from Hollowell Heath in Northamptonshire in
1775, nearly eleven years after it was hung up there, was not so lucky.
The newspaper records that a man was arrested and prosecuted for the
crime.17 Strangest of all is the case of Gill Smith, hung in chains in 1738
on Kennington Common for the murder of his wife. A week after his
execution, somebody cut off one of his legs at the knee and attempted
to remove one of his arms, although they were obstructed by his gibbet
12
Darby Olde Cotswold Punishments, p. 20.
13
Gloucester Journal, 8 November 1784, issue 3265.
14
London Chronicle 1759, issue 353.
15
Lloyd’s Evening Post, 4–6 April 1763, issue 894.
16
London Gazette, 14–18 February 1876, issue 12,726.
17
St James’s Chronicle or British Evening Post, 13–16 May 1775, issue 2223.
3 THE AFTERLIFE OF THE GIBBET 85
irons.18 This is very clearly not an attempt to rescue the body for burial
but probably represents the taking of criminal body parts as curios or as
a prank.
Weather
For many gibbets, it was neither planned removal nor illegal rescue but the
ongoing onslaught of British weather that eventually brought them down.
A newspaper correspondent reported meeting a youth in Derby carrying
the skull of Matthew Cochlane.19 Cochlane had been hung in chains f-
teen years earlier but his body had nally been blown down by the wind
the previous night. “Numbers, who had often stood in melancholy gaze”,
reported the witness, “repaired to the gibbet, and returned with vari-
ous parts of his remains”. When Tom Otter’s gibbet in Lincolnshire was
blown down in 1850, 46 years after he was rst hung up, the gypsies acted
quickly and were able to take nearly all the iron, except for the head piece,
which was kept by Edwin Jarvis of Doddington Hall.20
More dramatic weather put an end to York’s gibbet on Busselton
Common near Bristol when lightening split the gibbet “in a thousand
little splinters”21 and allowed the body, which had been hanging for four
years, to fall. A gibbet on Hounslow Heath was also struck by light-
ning in 1768, and one imagines that being tall and prominent structures
topped with iron, gibbets were not infrequently struck.
When the body came down shortly after it had been hung in chains,
either accidentally or during an attempted rescue, it was sometimes rehung.
The body of Captain James Lowry, wrote the Whitehall Evening Post or
London Intelligencer in 1758, having fallen down soon after hanging, had
been brought to Billingsgate where it awaited rehanging. On other occa-
sions, the body would be buried near the gibbet; this is what happened to
William Odell, who was reburied “under a gibbet near the hedge on Ealing
Common”.22 On nearby Finchley Common, in 1782, Matthew Flood’s
18
Old Common Sense or the Englishman’s Journal, 22 April 1738, issue 64.
19
Lloyd’s Evening Post, 28 October 1791, issue 5356.
20
Jarvis recorded the event in a commonplace book which is still kept at the hall in the
possession of Jarvis’s descendant Claire Birch.
21
London Evening Post, 29 June–2 July 1745, issue 2754.
22
Public Advertiser, 10 January 1761, issue 8170.
86 S. TARLOW
gibbet, which had been erected sixty years earlier, was clandestinely sawn
down and left near the remaining stump of gibbet post, after two of his n-
gers had been removed.23
Enclosure and Convenience
Since many gibbets were situated on common land, the enclosure of
the commons, which was proceeding swiftly in much on England and
Wales through the later part of the eighteenth century, precipitated the
removal of gibbets. This is what happened at Badley Moor, Norfolk, for
example, when James Cliffen’s gibbet was removed as part of the enclo-
sure process. Whyte notes that the gibbets of Stephen Watson on West
Bradenham Common and William Suffolk on North Walsham Common,
as well as Cliffen’s, were taken down in the same year that their parishes
were enclosed.24
gibbet lore
A quantity of local lore exists around gibbets and some stories recur
in several guises. One common motif is the bird nesting in the human
remains. Machie’s Norfolk Annal, vol. 1, 1800–1850 records that around
8 June 1801 a starling’s nest with young birds in it was taken “out of