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

unclaimed bodies of the deceased from workhouses to be sent for anatomisation instead.

    A depiction of Dick Turpin riding past The Brothers’ Gibbet at Gonerly, where a gypsy foretells his own fate. (Unknown artist, the Bruce Castle Museum.)

    The Tyburn Procession in 1747 as depicted in The Idle ’Prentice Hanged at Tyburn by William Hogarth.

    An engraving of the dissection of a felon by William Hogarth in his series The Rewards of Cruelty , 1750–1.
    Gibbetting was intended to make a permanent and public display of the consequences of crime. The body would be tarred after death and then hung in chains to preserve it on the gibbet for as long as possible. Such exhibitions attracted substantial crowds. It is said that 100,000 came to see the body of Lewis Avershaw gibbetted on Wimbledon Common in 1795. Somewhat surprisingly, in folk belief, objects associated with execution were often supposed to be lucky or have curative powers. Thus Northumbrians would cure toothache with a splinter of wood from Winters Gibbet on Elsdon Moor, and in Durham a shaving from the gibbet on Ferry Hill was similarly employed. The display of the felon however, ended in 1832.
    The size of the crowd on the day of execution itself exceeded the number gathered at any one time around the gibbet. The crowd at the execution of Dr Dodd in 1777 was said to have been one of the largest gatherings London had ever seen. Dodd was a gentleman, a clergyman and a philanthropist, but, after a sensational trial, he was convicted of forging a bond and thus became a celebrity candidate for the rope. A petition with thousands of signatures failed to gain him a reprieve and he was dispatched at Tyburn on 27 June 1777. Few executions attracted such interest but Barry Faulk has written that, ‘To write a history of capital punishment in England is to write a history of festive life’. For many, an execution signalled a holiday: schoolboys in Reading were given the day off to see the salutary display and London apprentices enjoyed a similar privilege. The crowd was often raucous and was well-catered-for by food vendors, publicans, quack doctors, entertainers, hawkers of broadsheets, and procurers, among others.

    A body gibbet and pillory, preserved at the Old Court Hall, Winchelsea, Sussex. The iron cage is capped with the skull of John Breeds, a butcher hanged in 1742.

    ‘The Gallows’ as depicted by Jouve in L’Assiette au Beurre , 23 November 1901.
    Everyone did not, of course, mix together indiscriminately. The wealthier classes rented windows overlooking the scaffold. At Tyburn they could reserve places on temporary seating erected for the spectacle. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, it was not quite respectable for gentlemen to attend executions. In 1868 The Tomahawk described these gentlemen spectators as ‘The swells – the dissipated government clerks and fast young attorneys, the whisker-less subalterns seeing the first of life and the wig-wearing fogies watching the last of it’. Few spectators would admit to being motivated by the feelings that inspired the eighteenth-century MP George Augustus Selwyn to tour executions. Selwyn travelled to the continent to witness torture on the scaffold and allegedly dressed up in women’s clothes to avoid being recognised among the crowds, a ruse that only made sense if, as many sources attest, many women indeed attended.
    The behaviour of the crowd at the moment of execution itself was much disputed throughout the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens, who was opposed to public execution, claimed that at the execution of the poisoner François Courvoisier, he had observed ‘No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes.’ On the other hand, the Reverend J. Davis, who supported the practice, informed a capital punishment commission in 1866 that he had officiated at twenty-four