The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) Read Online Free PDF

Each of its three cross-beams was about 9 feet long and stood on legs 18 feet high. It was erected in 1571 and could accommodate up to twenty-four felons at a time – though only in 1649 was this tested. The tree was taken down in 1759 for the rather mundane planning reason that it was obstructing traffic. A mobile gallows was employed in its place. Until 1783, when the place of execution was moved to outside Newgate Prison, executions at Tyburn were preceded by a riotous procession which left Newgate, went first to the Church of St Sepulchre, then through Holborn and down what is today Oxford Street. The journey could take up to two hours, with the condemned accompanied by their own coffins. By tradition they were passed drinks on their journey and the procession moved along with much buffoonery, the crowd being taken full advantage of both by prostitutes and pick-pockets.

    The Old Bailey (London’s Central Criminal Court) in 1809. Trials, even capital trials, usually took just a few minutes, and juries often gave their verdicts without retiring. (Illustration by Pugin and Rowlandson.)
    For the condemned, the period leading up to their deaths was often the only time in their wretched lives when they were the centre of attention. Some, such as Dick Turpin, who was executed at York racecourse on 7 April 1739, became celebrities and their exploits were rapidly romanticised.Jack Sheppard, whose portrait was commissioned in 1724, became one of many felons thus depicted. Such men held court and lived well, for a time. Most felons, however, merely went to a shabby end, and an attempt to die well and with dignity was all that was left to them. Elizabeth Fry found that a condemned woman in Newgate generally occupied her time by thinking about her ‘appearance on the scaffold, the dress in which she shall be hanged’. William Hepworth Dixon reported that, when a man remained defiant to the end in 1848, his mother cried out ‘Bravo, I knew he would die game!’ A party of his friends went to the pub afterwards in his memory.
    In the eighteenth century the ever-increasing number of offences for which one might be hanged and the decline of torturous punishments had posed something of a problem for the authorities. How was the punishment of a murderer to be distinguished from that of a mere thief? The answer had been found in the 1752 Murder Act, which had regularised the practice of either having the body of a murderer anatomised (dissected) by the surgeons, or else hung in irons on a public gibbet. Dishonouring the body after death was a fearsome prospect in a Christian society in which many believed that, without a proper burial, the deceased would be denied resurrection. The authorities then were able to stigmatise the murderer and they were also able to solve a practical educational difficulty.
    By the eighteenth century the expanding medical schools were finding it difficult to procure enough corpses required in order to teach anatomy. Only half a dozen or so bodies of felons were permitted by Elizabethan statutes to be sent to the College of Surgeons. Sending the bodies of most murderers would, it was hoped, alleviate this problem. The prospect struck terror into the condemned and something of that feeling can be seen Hogarth’s graphic depiction of do ctors gathered like vultures and leering over a corpse. However, there were still not enough corpses and the medical schools were forced into shady relationships with ‘resurrectionists’ in order to secure them. These men would dig up fresh corpses from graveyards and sell them on. Stealing corpses became known as ‘burking’ after William Burke and William Hare were discovered to have gone one step further, by murdering the living in order to sell their remains. The fate of Hare is unknown but Burke was executed and dissected in Edinburgh in 1829. Body snatching abated after 1832, when a thoughtful piece of legislation saved the graves of the well-off by allowing the