Punishing The Criminal Corpse And Its Afterlife

A variety of different forms of post-execution punishment and of aggravated execution practices that often involved further punishment of the convict’s corpse after death were used in the United Kingdom in the period leading up to 1700. However, outside cases involving treason or petty treason, the repertoire of such punishments was much smaller than that found in most other European countries, and the options that were available in the United Kingdom were also used much less frequently with one notable exception — a brief period in the mid-sixteenth-century when large numbers of British heretics were burnt at the stake (a punishment deemed particularly appropriate because it was also an effective post-execution punishment leaving no remains for burial). The execution practices used in medieval United Kingdom are difficult to analyse because they were poorly documented, often non-statutory and sometimes highly localised.

It is unclear, for example, whether the practice of executing felons by drowning, found in fourteenth-century, was also in use elsewhere. Some long-established local practices such as the Halifax “gibbet,” a relatively humane mechanism very similar to a guillotine, continued to be used fairly extensively until the mid-seventeenth-century. Everywhere else in the United Kingdom and Wales beheading, which was regarded throughout Europe as involving less dishonour than hanging, was usually reserved for high-status offenders.

Pieter Spierenburg’s suggestion that prolonged death on the gallows was “practically unknown” in early modern England slightly exaggerates the differences between Britain and the continent. The practice of boiling convicted prisoners to death, for example, was briefly given statutory backing in 1531 and several offenders, including a Norfolk maid-servant who had poisoned her mistress, suffered this punishment before the statute was repealed in 1547. Later attempts to revive it was not, however, successful and although examples of the hand of the condemned being cut off and nailed up in a public place can be found in sixteenth-century England, and as late as the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland, there can be no doubt that by the later seventeenth-century aggravated forms of execution designed to torment the convict was very rare in England, unless the offender had committed a treasonable offence. Historians working on early modern punishment in continental countries such as Germany, Holland and France — where breaking on the wheel, boiling and burning, not to mention burying alive, starving to death and drowning often remained in use well into the eighteenth-century and beyond — have therefore drawn a very different picture to those working in England and Wales. In the later sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries, the English gradually extended their use of two forms of aggravated execution — gibbeting and dissection — that were not based on increasing the torment experienced by the condemned but were entirely post-execution punishments targeted at the criminal corpse. These punishments, far from fading away, were growing in importance by the early-eighteenth-century. Although, as we will see, many early-eighteenth-century English commentators argued vehemently for the introduction of continental torment-inducing execution practices, they were not successful. Post-execution dissection or hanging in chains remained the central forms of aggravated execution procedure acceptable to those who shaped English capital punishment procedures in relation to murderers and property offenders throughout the eighteenth-century.

Both of these punishments had long histories by 1700. Gibbeting for both murderers and other heinous offenders such as violent robbers had been practised since at least the thirteenth-century. The precise methods by which offenders were gibbeted (or hung in chains as the process was more commonly described) and the various policies that were developed in relation to location, construction and so forth will be not discussed in detail here because Sarah Tarlow’s forthcoming book ‘Hung in Chains; The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain’ will deal with this subject in detail. However, the core characteristics of gibbeting — the secure and highly visible suspension of the corpse in a public location (and often for many years) in order to create a lasting warning and example, were well established by the seventeenth century. In the later Middle Ages, the gibbeting of the condemned while they were still alive was occasionally used to punish particularly heinous premeditated murders, but there is no serious post-1600 evidence of this in England. The English were not, however, averse to such practices when they dealt with colonial slaves. Following a slave rebellion in 1736, the authorities in Antigua burned fifty-eight rebels alive and broke five of them on the wheel, while a further six were reported to have been “hung in chains upon gibbets and starved to death (of whom one lived nine nights and eight days without any sustenance).” After death, their corpses were subjected to further punishment as “their heads were then cut off and fixed on poles, and their bodies burnt.”

Since convicted slaves were also starved to death on gibbets or had their heads displayed on poles in many other eighteenth-century British colonies, even though their offences were often more routine, the boasts of many eighteenth-century English writers that, in contrast to “the scenes of barbarity [..] so often exhibited” on the continent, “such tormenting and lingering deaths cannot mix well with our constitution,” need careful evaluation. Englishmen may have been fond of highlighting “the lenity of our laws, the boast and felicity of our constitution,” but their unwillingness to embrace torment-based execution practices was highly dependent on context, even though they steadfastly refused to acknowledge this. This said, however, in England and Wales at least the rhetoric was usually matched by the reality, and gibbeting remained very much a post-execution punishment until it was completely abolished in 1834.

Before the Murder Act of 1752 hanging in chains, as gibbeting was most commonly termed, even though it usually involved the use of a metal cage, was based on customary law and more specifically on the belief that the bodies of condemned men were at the King’s disposal. It was imposed by a form of executive order on the basis of customary procedure, rather than being laid down by statute as a formal punishment, and it is unclear whether it was always (or even usually) recorded in court when sentence of death was passed. This doubt about the proportion of gibbetings that were announced by the judges and therefore formally recorded in the surviving assize records, makes it very difficult to gauge how frequent the practice was in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. On the basis of finding only one instance in the assizes records of the five Home circuit counties between 1559 and 1625, and just a single isolated example in the seventeenth-century Oxford Circuit records, Cockburn has argued that gibbeting was uncommon before the eighteenth-century. It is possible, however, that it was quite frequently not recorded by the courts’ clerks and therefore largely invisible to the historian because of other non-court sources, such as newspapers, which would later record such events quite extensively, were not in existence until the final years of the seventeenth-century.

Gregory Durston has argued, by contrast, that gibbeting was “common practice in heinous cases” long before the eighteenth-century, and although he only quotes a few examples, such as the gibbeted corpse described in Samuel Pepys’ diary in 1661, Hartshorne’s work on the period 1671–1690 which includes four well-evidenced cases of murderers being gibbeted in various parts of England, suggests that by the final third of the century this practice may well have been fairly widespread. Gibbeting was fairly common by the time fuller newspaper coverage developed in the early-eighteenth century and may well have reached an all-time peak in the 1740s. Moreover, as soon as newspapers and printed Ordinary’s Accounts become available towards the end of the seventeenth-century reports of the gibbeting of London thieves and murderers immediately began to appear. In 1691 the Ordinary’s Accounts describes the gibbeting at Mile End of the murderer, James Selby and five years later the same source, and a London Newspaper — the Post Man, reported the gibbeting of Thomas Randall for murder and highway robbery at Kingsland “where he is to hang in irons till his body be consumed.” The Ordinary’s Accounts of the hanging in 1684 of a notorious London highwayman and murderer reported that after his execution his body was “cut down and put into a frame of iron […] and afterwards hung up again on the gibbet,” giving further credence to the French visitor Henri Misson’s observation in the late 1690s that “robbers in the highway that have doubled their felony by the addition of murder to theft” usually had their bodies enclosed in “several iron hoops” and exposed “upon the gibbet.”

The Admiralty Courts were also making quite widespread use of gibbeting by the beginning of the eighteenth-century — a tradition that seems to have been a longstanding one and had originally included Admiralty courts outside London. Two very different forms of post-execution gibbeting were used by the Admiralty courts when they punished offenders for capital crimes committed in a maritime context. First, the bodies of all those hanged by the court were secured and left well below the high tide mark for three consecutive tides. Then, if selected for further punishment, the corpse would be hung in chains at a more permanent site on land. In July 1700, for example, ten pirates were hanged at Execution Dock on two gibbets specially erected “within flood-mark,” two of whom were then “carried down in a boat in order to be Hang’d in Chains; one of them at halfway Tree between this City and Graves-End, and the other at the Hope.” In the same month the London newspapers also reported the gibbeting at Mile End of two offenders found guilty of murder by the Old Bailey judges, and since we also have evidence of two further gibbetings in metropolis in 1700 and 1701 — one being the hanging in chains of Captain Kidd at Tilbury — gibbeting was clearly established as a fairly frequent metropolitan occurrence by the end of the seventeenth-century, even though the precise numbers of involved, and how those numbers varied between that century and the eighteenth, remain very difficult to establish.