London: The Executioner's City E-Book

David Brandon

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Tyburn Fields is the best known site of execution in London, but London may be aptly named the executioner's city, so many were the places where executions could and did occur. This book reveals the capital as a place where the bodies of criminals defined the boundaries of the city and heads on poles greeted patrons on London Bridge.

Leseprobe

First published in the United Kingdom in 2006

This paperback edition first published in 2007

Reprinted 2022

The History Press

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Copyright © David Brandon and Alan Brooke, 2006, 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

David Brandon and Alan Brooke have asserted the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

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ISBN 978-1-8039-9162-7

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Contents

Acknowledgements

One

Introduction

Two

Evolving Penal Policy

Three

The Tower of London

Four

Smithfield

Five

Newgate and Old Bailey

Six

Tyburn

Seven

Charing Cross, Westminster and Whitehall

Eight

Executions North of the Thames

Nine

Execution Dock, Wapping

Ten

Executions South of the Thames

Eleven

Executioners and Hangmen of London

Twelve

The Carnival of the Scaffold Crowd

Glossary of London Prison and Gallows Slang

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the generous support and assistance of the staff at the Guildhall Library in the City of London. We also wish to thank Christopher Feeney at Sutton Publishing for his light-handed guidance and support, Anne Bennett for her sense of humour and the other members of the Sutton team for their efficient work.

David Brandon and Alan Brooke

ONE

Introduction

In 1998, under Section 36 of the Crime and Disorder Act, the death sentence was abolished for the last two offences which had retained the capital sanction – piracy with violence and treason. This brought to an end a practice that had existed as a common punishment in Britain for over a thousand years. The death penalty for murder had been effectively ended under the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act in 1965.

Since the abolition of public executions in 1868 the death penalty had been carried out within the privacy of prison walls with only a small number of witnesses in attendance. Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans, the last two people to be executed in Britain, both in 1964, stayed in their condemned cells (Allen in Walton, Liverpool, and Evans in Strangeways, Manchester) for the last few weeks of their lives, never alone, but always in the company of two prison officers. Two days before their execution the Home Secretary made it clear that there would be no reprieve although nobody had really expected one. This was evident from the fact that the majority of the media hardly thought it a worthy item of news. None the less these hangings yet again provoked calls for the total abolition of the death penalty as crowds gathered outside both prisons to make their feelings known.

The rituals leading up to their deaths were significantly different from those in the days of public executions, which were frequently attended by large crowds. The walk to the scaffold in 1964 was not greeted by abuse and insults from the crowd. It was an event held in camera, as it were. But there were similarities. The prisoners waited in the condemned cell still harbouring slender hopes of a last-minute reprieve; they walked, albeit a much shorter distance, to the scaffold; and the method of execution, hanging by the neck until dead, was familiar. A doctor examined the bodies of the executed men at intervals until no heartbeat or other signs of life could be detected. We cannot know what pain they felt once the door beneath the gallows opened and they plummeted to their deaths. Although they were left to hang for one hour, they were at least spared the longer and more painful strangulation suffered by their predecessors, whose friends pulled their legs to hasten death; and their families escaped the fights over the corpse with surgeons’ agents that were so commonplace in earlier days.

This book looks at the history of execution in London, which ended at the gallows in Wandsworth Prison in September 1961 when the 49-year-old murderer Hendrick Neimasz was hanged. By then, the issue of capital punishment was rarely absent from the public agenda. The debate reached fever pitch when Ruth Ellis, at 28 years of age, gained the dubious distinction of being the last woman to be executed in Britain. This took place at Holloway Prison in London on 13 July 1955. The cause of her death was recorded as ‘injuries to the central nervous system consequent upon judicial hanging’. Crowds assembled outside Holloway on the evening before and the morning of her execution and their numbers led the Governor to call for police reinforcements. However, this crowd was very different from those which had gathered in the days of public executions. At Holloway that day in 1955 around a thousand people stood silently as the sentence of the court was carried out. Some were praying for her soul, others were merely curious onlookers, but many among them were campaigners for the total abolition of the death penalty.

The subject of execution has long been and remains a controversial subject. Public executions attracted large, sometimes vast, crowds. Morbid though this may sound, execution represents an important aspect of history which affected thousands of people: the condemned, their families and friends, officials, observers and what we now might call the ‘chattering classes’. It was etched deeply into popular culture. Public executions were a regular feature of London life. The sixteenth-century diarist Henry Machyn recorded that he attended two and sometimes three executions per day. In one month in 1557 he saw 8 felons hanged at Tyburn, 3 men and 2 women burned at Smithfield and 7 pirates hanged at Wapping. Machyn, like many Londoners, witnessed such executions as a matter of course, as part of the popular calendar.

The history of execution and of the scaffold crowd was an area of study once largely ignored by historians but in recent years new research has contributed significantly to our understanding of the subject. Interest in the history of crime is evident from the proliferation of books, courses, museums, films and Internet sites over the past few years. The excellent ‘Old Bailey Online’ is an important addition to our knowledge of the history of crime, with over 100,000 documented cases between 1674 and 1834 now being available for the researcher. There is a rich seam of records in the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), as well as in other archives and libraries, particularly the Guildhall, the prime source for material on the history of London.

By the early seventeenth century there was a thriving market in tabloid-style journalism. Cheap literature such as broadsheets fed the apparently insatiable popular appetite for sensation and titillation. This material is early evidence of a genre consisting of tales of sex, blood and gore and the supernatural. Crime, criminals and criminality, both real and fictional, fascinate us – but they also repel us. While enjoying stories of murder and suspense, people in almost every period have expressed their fear that crime is getting out of hand. The issue has always featured in general elections. London, with its huge population and wealth, has understandably had more than its share of crime throughout the centuries. The most important seats of justice in the country, the Royal Courts, have long been based in London and have witnessed many high-profile and important cases. More executions, both in public and behind closed doors, have taken place in London than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. It is truly the execution capital of Britain.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were over 200 offences which carried the death penalty. Methods of execution over the centuries have ranged from burning, hanging, boiling, shooting, drowning and beheading to hanging, drawing and quartering. The latter was reserved for traitors, whose remains were subsequently put on public view, their heads placed on poles and displayed on Old London Bridge while their body parts likewise adorned the city gates. Later, in an age of expanding medical knowledge, surgeons would sometimes legally claim the bodies of the condemned for the purpose of anatomical teaching.

The rationale for inflicting such severe punishment was retribution and deterrence. However, by the late eighteenth century questions were increasingly being asked about the effectiveness of public execution as a deterrent. The belief was growing that the crowds were simply treating the spectacle as entertainment. Crowds flocked to the different sites of execution around London but they responded to the condemned and indeed to the whole occasion in ways that were not always consistent with what the authorities intended. If the purpose of the gruesome spectacle was deterrence then the exercise largely failed. Executions may well have served the function of summoning the people to witness the might and power of the monarch or the state, but the crowds all too often responded by displaying irreverence and mockery of that power. The reformer Henry Fielding (1707–54) recognised this when he wrote that public executions inspired the ‘vulgar with a contempt of the gallows rather than a fear of it’.

In an earlier book, Tyburn, London’s Fatal Tree (Sutton, 2004), we made the point that Tyburn was a significant place in the popular culture of London and it loomed large in the minds of the populace for six centuries or more. People visited the sites of executions, they talked about them constantly and the stories often developed into legends as they were retold, frequently being distorted or exaggerated in the process. In this book we have gone beyond Tyburn, although we still devote a chapter to it, to look at other places of execution in London. Some of these are well known, such as the Tower and Smithfield, but others are less familiar. Smithfield and Tyburn, for example, witnessed thousands of victims going to their deaths but across London there were many other places where executions were carried out, although some only infrequently or sometimes on no more than one occasion. We have tried to cover the best-known places of execution. We know that there were many other places where executions took place less often, and some of these are mentioned. We are only too aware that there may be other locations which have gone unrecorded or which our researches have not located. While we do not pretend to have achieved a comprehensive coverage of all execution sites, we hope that this book adds to an understanding of the importance and significance of the role that execution has played in the wider history of London.

TWO

Evolving Penal Policy

A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Ever since humans have been able to produce more than they needed for immediate consumption, a minority of society has appropriated the bulk of wealth for itself and established mechanisms for preserving the privileges and power which go with that wealth. Through government institutions and the machinery of the law, supported if necessary by force, they have devised methods to seek out and punish those whose behaviour they deem unacceptable. The actions or activities considered legal or illegal and the nature of the punishments inflicted have varied with changing social and economic circumstances over the centuries. Throughout, punishment has been intended to have both deterrent and retributive effects. In more modern times it has also sometimes been associated with the concept of rehabilitation of the offender.

In the seventh century an elaborate system of fines was established and executions were exceptional in the case of men because it was felt that every single man potentially had a role to play in the defence of the kingdom. Women, however, were regarded as dispensable. Their punishment for theft, for example, was likely to be drowning. The Danes, who first arrived in the eighth century, relied mainly on the payment by the offender of compensation to the victim’s family in the case of a murder. Compensation was on a sliding scale according to the perceived status of the victim. In the tenth century financial penalties began to be superseded by punishment involving physical violence, which was considered to be a more effective deterrent. For this reason whipping and mutilation were extensively employed. Executions for the most serious offences took the form of drowning or stoning.

Executioners were kept busy during the reign of Canute, who came to the throne in 1016. Capital punishment was infrequent but wrongdoers might be mutilated or scalped or have their eyes put out. Under William I executions were also exceptionally rare but mutilations, eye-extractions and the removal of testicles were all common punishments. All of these were, of course, inflicted without any form of anaesthesia. During the reigns of the Conqueror’s sons William II and Henry I capital punishment returned for those whose guilt had been established, usually after ordeal by fire or boiling water. Murder, treason, burglary, arson, robbery and theft carried the death penalty. By contrast Henry II (r. 1154–89) favoured amputation of hands or feet rather than execution for such crimes as robbery, murder and coining.

In the thirteenth century serious offenders were likely to find themselves being outlawed rather than executed, but this was not because of any merciful instinct on the part of the authorities. In practice outlawing subjected the offender to a living death. He was literally an outcast, and both he and his family lost their property. No one was allowed to give him succour and for some time at least he could be killed with impunity by any citizen. No legitimate way of making a living was open to an outlaw.

In 1241 hanging, drawing and quartering was employed for the first time in England. The victim was placed on a hurdle or sledge and dragged by horses to the place of execution. He was then hanged by a rope until nearly dead, whereupon he was cut open and drawn (or disembowelled) – his entrails being burned at the scene in front of him, preferably while he was still alive – whereupon he was then dismembered. Those subjected to this frightful death had been found guilty of treason – of waging war against the king – and only an aggravated form of execution was regarded as sufficient for such a heinous crime.

An important element in execution was that it took place in public and was intended to act as a deterrent to those who observed it. Punishment for lesser offenders also took place in public. The stocks and the pillory, for example, probably came into use for the first time in the late fourteenth century, generally for various petty offences. They were an economical form of punishment, easy to set up and requiring little or no supervision for the victim, who was exposed to public humiliation while suffering considerable physical discomfort. Additionally the crowd could express their abhorrence by showering the miscreant with various kinds of unsavoury filth. If the occupant was particularly disliked, the crowd, although it was against the law to do so, might assail him or her with harder missiles such as rocks. This could have fatal effects. In 1731 Mother Needham, the most notorious London procuress of her time, was stoned in this way, receiving fatal injuries. In 1732 John Waller, a known informer and false witness, was pelted severely until a member of the crowd calmly removed him from the pillory while the beadles and constables stood by and watched. Waller was then knocked down, kicked, beaten and trodden on until he was dead. Such excesses were, thankfully, rare.

Exposure to public ridicule and shame were for centuries of pivotal importance in penal practice. Reputation and standing in the community could be permanently damaged by a spell in the pillory, especially for such people as dishonest traders or those found guilty of unnatural or odd sexual offences. From early times, however, much to the chagrin of the authorities, a sense developed that entertainment and enjoyment were to be had from watching punishments and executions. This obviously detracted from the official intention that such spectacles would overawe observers with the majesty of the law and act as effective deterrents to criminal activity.

Another intended way to discourage serious crime was the impaling on spikes in prominent places of the boiled or pickled heads of executed traitors. For many years the gatehouse of London Bridge was adorned with these grisly exhibits. London Bridge was the main route into the city for those who had arrived from the continent at Dover. It was always busy with English and foreign travellers who could not but be impressed, favourably or otherwise, by this stark evidence of the Crown’s success at rooting out sedition. The most heads ever noted in place at any one time was thirty-four. London Bridge even had an official Keeper of the Heads, whose responsibility it was to place each new arrival on a sharp spike where it could be seen by all passers-by. If there was any danger that some of the rotting heads were becoming old hat, as it were, he casually took them off their spikes and threw them down into the Thames. A viewing of the latest heads decorating London Bridge was one of the joys of a pleasant Sunday afternoon family stroll for those who lived in the city or in Southwark. Among the most illustrious figures whose heads ended up on London Bridge were (probably) William Wallace; Jack Cade, the rebel leader in 1450; Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More in 1535; Thomas Cromwell in 1540; some of the regicides in 1661; and in 1684 William Staley, a wealthy Catholic framed by that evil and mendacious little toad, Titus Oates. The only female head known to have adorned the bridge was that of Elizabeth Barton, a religious visionary who came to be regarded as a political subversive and was executed in 1534.

An extremely odd story concerning the heads on London Bridge dates back to the sixteenth century. A number of German workers who were employed at the Mint fell seriously ill, apparently from the poisonous fumes given off by the molten metal with which they were working. In accordance with a hoary old folk-belief that drinking out of a cup made from a human skull could have miraculously therapeutic effects, permission was given to remove some of the heads at that time adorning the bridge and fashion from them a number of drinking vessels. The German workers, whose skills must have been highly valued to merit such preferential treatment, then drank from these cups. The outcome was something of a curate’s egg, only being excellent in parts. Some of the men recovered but most died.

From 1684 Temple Bar, which marked the western boundary of the city where Fleet Street met the Strand, also displayed the heads or other body parts of traitors. A formal gate here seems to have dated back to the fourteenth century but in the early 1670s it was rebuilt in a state-of-the-art fashion by Wren. The heads of the Rye House Plotters and some other traitors were stuck on spikes atop the bar. The Jacobite Francis Towneley, in 1746, may have had the dubious privilege of being the last person whose head was exhibited on Temple Bar, although some accounts state that the last heads were put on show there in 1776. Spyglasses could be hired for closer examination of the gruesome trophies posted up on Temple Bar. In 1772 two of the heads on Temple Bar fell off during a violent storm and then rolled with apparent determination some distance down the street, watched by knots of horrified bystanders. In 1878 Temple Bar was removed because it was causing traffic congestion. It has recently been re-erected close to St Paul’s Cathedral. Near Temple Bar there stood a pillory, whose most notable occupants were probably Titus Oates in 1685 and Daniel Defoe in 1703.

Hanging became the most common method of execution, although people of noble blood were entitled to the ‘privilege’ of decapitation with a sword or axe. Heretics were punished by burning. It is clear that crime was coming to be regarded as a more serious problem from the late fifteenth century with the emergence of stricter punishments attempting to keep it within bounds. Henry VIII (1509–47) was the first monarch to allow executions on Sundays. He also inaugurated boiling to death as a form of execution. Whipping was employed against vagrants, whose very existence was seen as a major source of criminality. Henry’s reign was an extremely busy one for the executioners of London and elsewhere. As many as 70,000 people may have met their death at the executioners’ hands during that time. Fines, public and painful humiliation and spells in prison were used to punish minor offenders. Punishment became more barbaric. Someone consigned to the pillory might also have his ears nailed to the woodwork or perhaps a hole bored in his tongue. Interestingly in view of future developments, it was Henry who inaugurated the system whereby barber-surgeons were given the bodies of executed felons for research and demonstration purposes. In 1540 they were provided with four corpses annually. As will be seen later, this number was to increase in the eighteenth century amid considerable controversy.

Elizabeth – ‘Good Queen Bess’ – ascended the throne in 1558 but did not allow her much-vaunted femininity to soften penal policy. The number of executions rose significantly during her reign but she also made considerable use of banishment to the European continent. While this might appear humane by comparison with capital punishment, its effect on the recipient was not unlike outlawing, compounded by the fact that the victim was likely to find himself penniless, powerless and probably friendless in a foreign country. The idea of banishment lies behind the later extensive use of transportation as a punishment for criminal activity. Hanging was by now far and away the most common form of execution and indeed the English became notorious in Europe for the number of hangings they carried out.

The Tudor monarchs Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth all unleashed ferocious punitive action against heretics, a practice that continued into the seventeenth century. Huge numbers were strangled, disembowelled and burned, often after having been tortured. The hangman was also kept exceptionally busy during the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. However, as those in power have found before and since, ideas can have a force and potency that cannot be expunged simply by punishing or executing all those who utter them.

The Tudor monarchs wanted to strengthen the power of the Crown and the ability of the law to protect and encourage the business activities of the developing merchant and financier classes on whom they leant. They were also determined to clip the wings of those nobles who had survived the Wars of the Roses and who hankered after a return to the power their ancestors had enjoyed in feudal days. Likewise those in power were concerned about what they saw as the threat posed by the increasingly restive common people and particularly by ‘sturdy vagabonds’: menacing gangs of rootless, itinerant men who terrorised the countryside, robbing with impunity. The rudimentary law-enforcement agencies that existed were almost powerless to stem the growing tide of lawlessness and violence in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

The standard punishments for vagrancy and a range of other misdemeanours were whipping and sometimes branding. Even more barbaric were the practices of removing the ears of those who uttered seditious words and amputating the hands of those who wrote seditious material. In 1579 a Puritan named John Stubbes wrote a book criticising the proposed marriage of Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, a match that was exceedingly unpopular in England. Stubbes and the publisher of the book were condemned to lose their right hands. Immediately after his hand had been severed, Stubbes waved the stump in the air crying, ‘God save the Queen!’ In 1630 Dr Leighton was foolish enough to publish a book lampooning royalty, the peerage and the Church of England. He was whipped severely and placed in the pillory after his ears had been ripped off. The septum of his nose was broken and he was branded with the letters SS to indicate that he had stirred up sedition.

From the early eighteenth century a wide variety of petty offenders were placed in houses of correction or bridewells, where they underwent usually short sentences involving hard labour. It was hoped that such work would have a reforming effect on those concerned who were feckless or wayward but not hopelessly criminalised. The principle of hard labour underpinned penal practice until well into the Victorian era. The prescribed punishment for felonies, these being the most serious offences, was death.

It was in London that the threat of escalating crime seemed worst. London offered a unique range of opportunities for criminal activity, both professional and opportunistic. Its population was growing steadily and many of those who migrated inwards were rootless, volatile, and unskilled, very much at the mercy of economic slumps. All around them was evidence of the stark contrast between the affluence of the few and the grinding poverty and squalor that was the everyday experience of the majority of the population. The labyrinthine layout of London offered numerous ‘Alsatias’, criminal ghettos offering anonymity and support networks for criminals. The agencies for law enforcement were feeble and certainly ineffective in coping with the rising levels of criminal and anti-social behaviour, much of which was highly organised. Suggestions that an official and professional police force be established, however, met with very little support in eighteenth-century England.

The number of capital offences greatly increased during the eighteenth century as successive governments attempted to tackle the apparently inexorable rise in the incidence of crime. The new laws were particularly designed to protect the property of the increasingly important bourgeoisie – the merchants, industrialists and financiers who were busily enriching themselves as Britain was transformed into an urbanised and industrialised society – despite the lack of an effective police force. What became known as the ‘Waltham Black Act’ of 1722 was aimed ostensibly at poachers but was also used as a Trojan horse to bring in the death penalty for a host of other ‘rural’ crimes. As Sir Leon Radzinowicz, an expert in criminal jurisprudence, commented: ‘The Act constituted in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code which indiscriminately punished with death a great many offences, without taking into account either the personality of the offender or the particular circumstances of each offence.’ These and various other legal enactments were evidence of a hardening of the attitude of the governing classes towards the common people, whom they saw as increasingly irreligious, disrespectful, truculent and criminally inclined. A few hard-liners muttered darkly that hanging was too good for common criminals and some even suggested that they should be broken on the wheel instead!

Public hanging continued to be the ultimate penal sanction and it was unashamedly intended to be a deterrent: terrifying evidence of the power of the state and its ability to bring those who broke the law to account for their crimes. The supposed solemnity and awfulness of public hanging was, however, appropriated by the populace and frequently turned into a mockery of the law, a form of free mass entertainment attracting vast crowds. Unpopular felons were subjected to verbal and, on occasions, physical abuse. Those felons who were liked by the crowd were cheered and often showered with flowers or fruit. The most popular of all were those who exchanged quips with the crowd, swaggered around with a devil-may-care hauteur and launched bitter diatribes against the executioner, informants, judges and corruption in high places. The hangman, the chaplain or Ordinary and other officials were the target of scornful, even scathing abuse. The vendors of refreshments and of so-called ‘Last Dying Confessions’ found a ready market for their wares while thieves enjoyed rich pickings, frequently oblivious to the felon kicking out in his death agonies, possibly sent to the gallows for the self-same crime of picking pockets! No wonder London was known as the ‘City of the Gallows’. As Clive Emsley said,

Public punishment was theatre. In as much as the ruling class or the state had devised such punishment it was didactic theatre: the gallows and the pillory were to provide lessons and warnings for other would-be transgressors of the law. But for the crowds, drawn from all social groups, the proceedings appear to have been rather melodrama of the rudest sort; there were villains who might be abused and unfortunate heroes who might be cheered and cherished.

From 1752 the death sentence for murder could, at the judge’s discretion, be placed on an aggravated basis when ‘An Act for the Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder’ was passed. Now the corpses of hanged felons were systematically made available for the surgeons as object lessons in the teaching of anatomy. Humiliation was further heaped on the deceased by this dissection taking place in public, with an audience of aspiring surgeons and physicians and anyone else who cared to come along. The same Act gave judges discretionary powers to order the bodies of hanged felons to be gibbeted and put on public display in prominent places. The phrase commonly used was ‘hung in chains’ but in reality the cadavers were placed within a cage of iron bars.

In 1688 there were about fifty capital offences. Between 1660 and 1819 no fewer than 187 additional offences came to carry a capital sentence. These included cutting hop-bines, setting fire to coal mines, concealing the death of an illegitimate child, sending threatening letters, damaging a fish pond, bigamy and stealing a shroud from a grave. This collection of laws was known as the ‘Bloody Code’ and pathetic stories have often been related of how children aged 12 or under were hanged for stealing items worth just a few pence. The actuality was more complex. On paper the law was indeed savagely punitive but in practice it could be applied with humanity and pragmatism. Courts were often reluctant to convict where the penalty seemed disproportionate to the crime committed. Increasingly they imposed non-capital punishments on convicted felons. These could involve detention with hard labour or transportation. Penal policy in the eighteenth century was characterised by a flexible although capricious balance between the deterrent of terror and practical humanitarianism. J.M. Beattie summed it up:

An overriding pattern is clear, despite fluctuations over time and differences from place. The stern imperative of a criminal code in which, under the Tudors, execution became mandatory for a wide range of property crimes gave way in practice to a more moderate regime, the harsh sanctions of the law being blunted by judges and jurors alike. More acquittals and partial verdicts . . . resulted in falling rates of hanging and the elaboration of a number of alternative, non-capital punishments.

Before the creation of police forces in the nineteenth century only small numbers of offenders were apprehended and brought to justice. Those who were caught risked being made an example of and could be dealt with ferociously. However, the courts frequently practised what was called ‘pious perjury’. This meant, for example, that where capital offences involving theft were being tried, juries might deliberately undervalue what had been stolen to render the offence a misdemeanour, thus attracting a lesser penalty than a felony. Judges sometimes dismissed cases on their own initiative and reprieves, even on the day set for the hanging, were by no means uncommon. Many pregnant women convicted of capital offences avoided the death sentence by pleading ‘benefit of belly’. This allowed them a stay of execution until the baby was born, after which most were pardoned anyway. People of good character or those who could convince the court of extenuating circumstances might be treated leniently. Before 1706 it had been possible for clergy and other lettered persons to elude the death penalty for a number of offences by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’, an ancient and increasingly anomalous form of privilege resulting from the existence of ecclesiastical courts alongside secular ones. Those claiming benefit of clergy merely had to recite a brief passage from the Bible. This passage could easily be learned by the most ignorant and illiterate of offenders, who then used it to escape the gallows. In an increasingly secular society this was clearly an anomaly and it gradually dropped out of use. The new capital offences that came on to the statute book in the eighteenth century were made ‘non-clergyable’ and benefit was finally abolished in 1827.

The unpredictable, even capricious, mixture of terror with humanity and clemency by the courts added powerfully to their mystique. Bewigged judges in ermine-tipped scarlet robes donned the black cloth when death sentences were to be pronounced, thereby emphasising the majesty of the law and overawing those who offended against it. The fact that the court’s decision might be unclear until the very last minute added enormously to the tension. Such flexibility in applying the law, however, meant that it was frequently both inconsistent and inequitable.

The first known reference to the idea of transportation is believed to be that by the geographer and historian Richard Hakluyt, who in 1584 recommended the sending of criminals to the American colonies where they could be usefully employed in sawing and felling trees and planting sugar cane. Small numbers of felons and political prisoners were dispatched to the North American colonies of Virginia and Maryland and to plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. However, it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Britain systematically transported large numbers of felons convicted of serious crimes, including many who previously would have been hanged and for whom transportation was a reprieve from or commutation of the death sentence.

Between 1718 and 1775 at least 30,000 convicts were transported to the Americas. The Transportation Act of 1718 made it clear that transportation was considered to be not only a punishment and a deterrent to crime, but also a means of supplying the colonies with the labour force they needed for their economic expansion to proceed. Transportation was also employed in cases where for a variety of reasons, such as the prisoner’s youthfulness or previous good character, it was decided to commute the death sentence. After the American colonies won their independence and refused to receive any more convicts, there was a somewhat panicky search for alternative destinations before Australia was agreed upon. As a temporary expedient it was decided that convicts whose capital sentences had been commuted would be housed in superannuated wooden warships that had been stripped of their armament, running rigging and other fittings. These notorious prison ‘hulks’ were moored on the River Thames and elsewhere. The convicts were mostly employed in public building, dockyard labour or maintenance works. The conditions in these hulks quickly became even worse than in the foulest prisons on land and their existence was widely regarded as scandalous.

Whether transportation to the New World was an effective form of punishment was the subject of vigorous debate. Notable prison reformers such as Sir John Fielding and John Howard believed that transportation taught felons the benefits of hard work and took them away from the criminal networks and rookeries which were such a feature of London especially. The lawyer Sir William Eden disagreed. He believed that some people offended simply so that they could enjoy the ‘cushy’ conditions of a term of transportation with the possibility of a fresh start in the New World at the end of it. He further suggested that the most dangerous felons, instead of being transported, should be exchanged for Christians who had been enslaved and were eking out miserable existences in parts of North Africa, sometimes as galley slaves.

The concept of hard labour in the colonies or in the houses of correction in England can now be seen as a significant development in the process whereby punishment changed from being a physical and public spectacle to one carried out away from the public gaze and defined in terms of labour and time. Hard labour was believed to combine elements of punishment for the criminal and retribution for society with the possibility of reforming the criminal’s character. The ferment of debate around penal issues stands alongside efforts to supervise alehouses and other drinking places more effectively and to abolish sports such as cockfighting, pugilism and bull-baiting, which attracted potentially riotous crowds. An arsenal of draconian legal sanctions was drawn up to clamp down on poaching, which was seen as another example of the reprehensible and growing lack of deference to authority among the so-called ‘lower orders’.

Among those who influenced public policy, attitudes were contradictory. Some called for harsher punishment. The apparent severity of the law, however, frequently led judges and juries down the paths of clemency and humanity. The voices of many were raised against conditions in the country’s prisons and on board the hulks. Transportation, too, had its critics. Some argued that it was too harsh, others that it was too lenient, while some believed it was not cost-effective. As the debate continued to rage, the number of executions declined. Between 1819 and 1825 only 597 out of 7,770 people sentenced to death were actually hanged. In London in 1829 only 24 hangings for offences other than murder took place. From 1832 hangings for crimes other than murder had virtually ended. However, between 1787 and 1868 about 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia, Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island.

The eighteenth century saw the beginning of serious criticism of the penal system. Henry Fielding, the Westminster and Middlesex JP and co-founder with his brother Sir John of the Bow Street Runners, deplored the exhibitionist nature of public hangings and the way in which they either made serious miscreants into swaggering popular heroes or highlighted the pathetic behaviour and lack of dignity of those unable to hide their terror. He argued that ‘the executions of criminals . . . serve . . . a purpose diametrically opposite to that for which they were designed; and tend to inspire the vulgar with a contempt for the gallows rather than a fear of it’. In 1778 Sir William Meredith MP argued that barbarous laws and their inconsistent application did little to deter crime. Most offences went undetected and only a small proportion of those convicted of felony were hanged. The criminal could therefore go about his activities knowing that he had a good chance of evading arrest and conviction, let alone a premature death on the scaffold. Those convicted of forgery and coining were very rarely pardoned, but the frequency with which these crimes continued to be committed strongly suggested that hanging was not an effective deterrent.

Critics of penal practice varied enormously in their explanations of why crime was apparently such a serious problem. Some, for example, blamed it on the growing irreligiousness of society while others argued that material and environmental factors needed to be addressed. The question of how to deal with rising levels of crime likewise elicited proposals that varied from increasing the number of capital offences and greater employment of corporal punishment to the use of alternatives such as custodial sentences involving reform and rehabilitation. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was among those who believed that punishments should be made to fit specific offences. Enlightenment thinkers on the European continent, including Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria, argued that crime was a social problem that could not be solved simply by creating more severe punishments. Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818) thought that brutal punishments such as hanging were merely retributive, had little deterrent effect and should be reduced in number. He also argued that the savagery of the penal code often led the courts, for humanitarian reasons, to be inconsistent in the way in which they applied the law. Romilly was tireless in his campaigning for a reduction in capital offences but the received opinion continued to be that hanging was essential if public order was to be maintained and so his success was limited. Like others at the time, Romilly was opposed to the idea of establishing a professional police force in spite of the possibility that effective policing might deter criminal activity.

Romilly was a man ahead of his time, the advance guard of reform as it were, and there is no doubt that by the time he died there were signs that public opinion was changing and new ideas emerging. As Robert Shoemaker said, ‘instead of injuring their bodies and damaging their reputations, the new punishments sought to reform convicts from the inside out by changing their frame of mind.’ In 1819 the House of Commons appointed a Committee of Inquiry into the Criminal Laws. In 1822 Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) became Home Secretary and between 1823 and 1827 initiated the modification and clarification of the criminal justice system, substantially reducing the number of capital offences. By this time some people were criticising him for moving too cautiously but he had his heart set on the establishment of a police force in London. Bravely flying in the face of enormous hostility from powerful sources, he pushed through his Metropolitan Police Act in 1829. There were many teething problems and considerable initial hostility to the new ‘Peelers’ or ‘Bobbies’, but they proved effective in combating crime and a few years later new legislation came into force allowing paid police forces to be raised and equipped in the provinces.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 the number of hanging offences had come down from well over 200 to just 15. These included murder, arson, rioting, robbery with violence, piracy, wrecking, serious sexual crimes and the theft of government money or securities. Two decades later the number of capital offences was reduced to just four. The number of hangings in London was falling significantly. This was evidence of a greater sense of security in homes and workplaces and on the streets of the metropolis, and this had much to do with the existence of the police. In 1834 one of London’s executioners had to be laid off because there was insufficient work for him. Branding ended in 1829, gibbeting was abolished in 1834 and the pillory in 1837. Public hangings continued in Britain until 1868. Transportation ended in the same year. Increasing use was made of custodial sentences for serious offenders, all prisons coming under Home Office control in 1877.

All this may have been evidence of a more enlightened and rational approach to penal matters but one area of the hangman’s work still smacked of superstition and witchcraft. The bodies of suicides were not usually permitted burial on consecrated ground. Instead they were interred at a crossroads as dawn broke, with a stake driven through them by the hangman. It was thought that the stake pinned the spirit of the departed to the ground and thus stopped it haunting those left behind. There may also have been some symbolic significance in the crucifix shape of the crossroads. If nothing else, some believed that the number of possible routes at a crossroads confused the suicide’s ghost, who thus found it difficult to decide in which direction to go in order to wreak revenge on the living. In 1823 Parliament ended crossroad burials and allowed suicides to be buried on consecrated ground. However, such burials were still normally confined to the disfavoured northern side of the churchyard and were conducted between nine in the evening and midnight and without religious ceremony. For another fifty years the bodies of suicides continued to be subjected to dissection in medical schools.

Two of the last traditional burials of suicides in London took place in 1823 and 1825 respectively. The first was that of a man named Griffiths, who was buried near Sloane Square after having a stake driven through his heart by the hangman. The second interment was more bizarre and involved a prisoner in Newgate who successfully committed suicide by slitting his throat. His body was taken out in a cart accompanied by the hangman. Next to the body stood a miniature gallows with a razor hanging from it. This was held up by the hangman to indicate that the deceased had cheated the gallows. He then drove a stake through the body which was placed in a prepared hole. Finally lime was thrown over the body and the hole filled in.

A battery of arguments was used to counter the efforts of those wishing to abolish capital punishment. There was no realistic alternative to hanging for those who committed cold-blooded murder, it was asserted. Hanging was the ultimate deterrent and its abolition would lead to increased murder rates and to the more determined members of the criminal fraternity using guns as a matter of course. The public felt safer knowing that the capital sanction was still available. The existence of the abolition movement was cited as evidence of precisely those namby-pamby liberal attitudes which valued the murderer’s welfare above that of his victim.

In the years following the Second World War a number of murder trials caught the public imagination in Britain, in particular the cases of Craig and Bentley in 1953, the hanging of Timothy John Evans in 1950, the execution of John Reginald Christie in 1953 and finally the trial and hanging of Ruth Ellis in 1955. All these threw up questions and concerns about capital punishment and ensured that the issue was prominent in the public agenda. In 1957 an Act was passed which formally distinguished between capital and non-capital murder and introduced the defence of ‘diminished responsibility’. The penalty for all but the most serious types of murder was now to be life imprisonment. In 1965 a Labour government abolished hanging after a sequence of controversial judgments and miscarriages of justice had continued to keep the issue at the forefront of public debate. Despite many calls for the restoration of the death sentence for selected offences, such as the murder of on-duty police officers, successive governments have so far resisted a return to capital punishment in the United Kingdom.