Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

that of Wallace on London Bridge. Although there is no specific reference to Tyburn, it was claimed in a ballad that Fraser was taken from Cheapside to Tyburn wearing a garland on his head and fetters on his legs.
    Although evidence for the period from the mid-fourteenth to the sixteenth century is somewhat patchy, Tyburn is known to have played its part in connection with some of the notable people and events of the time. Roger Mortimer, the exceptionally ambitious Earl of March, had become the lover of Queen Isabella and conspired with her to depose the weak Edward II. Although the King was indeed deposed and later horribly murdered, their efforts rebounded on them because they resulted in the accession to the throne of the young Edward III, a man of very different kidney from his father. He initiated a covert raid on Nottingham Castle in which Mortimer was seized and dragged off to London. He was placed in the Tower and then, according to John Stow, he was ‘drawne to the Elmes and there hanged on the common gallows’ (Stow 1605: 229–30). Other chronicles have stated that Mortimer was drawn from the Tower to the Elms about a league outside the City of London. The Grey Friars Chronicle, however, is more specific, stating that he was ‘Hangyd and drawne at Tyburn for tresoun’. Mortimer was left to hang for two days and two nights before being buried in Greyfriars Church.
    Among the thousands executed at Tyburn throughout its long history there was a steady flow of those who had taken part in rebellions. An early threat to London came during the reign of Richard II. In 1377, at the age of ten, he succeeded Edward III. Within four years he was faced with a serious rebellion when peasants led by Wat Tyler took up arms in protest over the new poll tax, marched from Kent and Essex to storm the City and demanded to see the King. The revolt was suppressed but provided an excuse for taking reprisals against perceived dissenters. One such group were the Lollards, the name given to the followers of John Wycliffe. The Lollards were heretics active in England in the latter part of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. Believed to be England’s only native medieval heretical body, they originated in Oxford in the 1370s.
    Tyburn as a place of execution came very much to be associated with the Lollards in the popular mind and somehow even the origins of its name were described by some as due to this association: ‘Tieburne, some will have it so called from Tie and Burne, because the poor Lollards for whom this instrument was first set up, had their necks tied to the beame, and their lower parts burnt in the fire’ (Clinch 1890: 67).
    The troubled times of the reign of Richard II at the close of the fourteenth century had helped the spread of Lollard ideas. With the accession of the House of Lancaster in 1399 an attempt was made to reform and restore constitutional authority in Church and state. In 1401 the Act ‘De Haeretico Comburendo’ – on the burning of heretics – was introduced. This Act was directed against the Lollards, ‘who thought damnably of the sacraments and usurped the office of preaching’. Evidence shows that many Lollards were executed in London, particularly at Smithfield and places such as St Giles but few are definitely known to have died at Tyburn despite the claim mentioned above that Tyburn was erected precisely for the purpose of executing them.
    There are many cases of people being drawn, hanged and quartered in London after Mortimer’s execution in 1330. Among these was Alderman Nicholas Brembre in 1388. He was an immensely ambitious man who had been a close adviser to Richard II, but, being prepared to stop at nothing to elevate his own position, found that he had made powerful enemies who were only too happy to bring him down and had few friends to support him. Detailed information on executions around this time is scanty but one definite case is that of a man who was