Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree Read Online Free PDF

murdered in his own home by an intruder who broke in for the purposes of theft. John Stow suggests that there was a miscarriage of justice as the murdered man’s wife was accused and burnt and three servants were executed for the crime at Tyburn. Only later, in 1391, was the actual intruder brought to justice and hanged.
    Famine hit the City in 1391 and ill-feeling was exacerbated when rumours circulated about the King’s extravagant lifestyle. In 1399, in a climate of intense social unrest resulting from high taxes, John Hall was executed at Tyburn for being an accomplice to the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, the seventh and youngest son of Edward III, and one of a group of nobles who had opposed Richard II for some years. From 1397 these men were arrested, Gloucester himself being imprisoned in Calais. However, he died within weeks amid suspicion that he had been murdered. Now more rumours circulated to the effect that Richard had ordered four knights to kill Gloucester. Two years later Hall was arrested and charged as an accomplice to the murder of Gloucester, it being alleged that he had kept the door of Gloucester’s room open which allowed the knights to enter with ease and smother him. On 17 October 1399 Hall was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn where he was hanged, had his bowels burnt and was then quartered. His head was brought to the place where Gloucester had been murdered. Following Richard’s abdication in favour of Henry IV, the four knights were later arrested and executed at Cheapside. Ironically, Richard II was himself murdered shortly afterwards at Pontefract Castle on 14 February 1400.
    After Richard’s death there were plots to overthrow his successor Henry IV. Seditious material attacking Henry was published and distributed, but in 1402 the King moved against the perpetrators, some of whom were arrested and eventually executed at Tyburn. Roger Clarendon, a knight and eight friars were ‘strangled at Tiborne and their [ sic ] put into execution’ (Halle 1809: 26). In addition, Walter de Baldocke, the prior of Launde in Leicestershire, and another friar were executed although it is unclear whether this happened at Tyburn.
    Those who recorded executions during these times did not always make it clear exactly where these happened. Some records state no more than ‘executed in London’. For example, William Serle who had been a servant of Richard II spread the idea after 1400 that the King was still alive and additionally forged a seal in his name. Serle was recorded as having been ‘drawn from Pontefract through the chiefest Citties of England and put to death at London’. Gregory’s Chronicle, however, actually states that Serle was executed at Tyburn.
    Despite the sparseness of sources relating to Tyburn during these centuries, those that are available give the impression that it is mostly men of rank who died there – women get scarcely a mention. In 1416, for example, there is a record that Benedict Wolman, custodian of the Marshalsea Prison, was executed at Tyburn, while in the 1420s Sir John Mortimer met a similar fate. He had been lodged in the Tower on a charge of treason and then attempted to escape, a crime deemed to be petty treason. He received a beating and was then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. If poor people were indeed executed at Tyburn, then the chroniclers clearly thought their deaths were not usually worth mentioning. A few who appear in the records are the thief Will Wawe hanged at Tyburn in 1427; William Goodgroom, a horse dealer in 1437; John David, an apprentice, executed in 1446; and John Scott, John Heath and John Kenington who went to their deaths for slandering the King and some of his council. Others of the commonalty who died at Tyburn are not even named. They included a locksmith executed in 1467 for robbery and four yeomen of the Crown hanged in 1483.
    Tyburn witnessed the culmination of a remarkable case in the 1440s. Roger Bolingbroke, an astrologer and