1701, England.
On the fringes of London, two men look out over the River Thames where they see the body
of a caged dead man hanging from a wooden post.
They both grimace in unison as the wind carries the awful stench of decomposition into their
nostrils.
It’s a sight to behold, so savage in nature and yet the law of the land.
The horror the men feel at this monstrous sight is intentional.
The message is clear: All those that break our laws will end up like this, swinging on
the gibbet until the flesh has fallen from their bones.
The caged dead man was the pirate hunter, turned pirate himself, William Kidd.
Kidd was once a friend to the rich and powerful in England, whom he served as a privateer.
Kidd was also once a darling to those he served across the pond in the New World, but he fell
out of favor after his brand of violent entrepreneurship served mainly himself and his men.
He was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy and hanged on May 23 at London’s
Execution Dock.
This was a place near the Thames where close to 400 pirates and smugglers were strung up
until death, often a slow form of hanging since there was no neck-breaking drop.
These were public events.
They were supposed to act as a kind of dark entertainment for the public just as tabloid
newspapers titillate people today with stories of crime and punishment.
As one person wrote back in the 1700s, “immense crowds of spectators” would turn up to watch
the hangings.
When Kidd got his turn, things didn’t exactly go to plan.
On the first attempt, the rope snapped, which gave rise to shouts and jeers from the madding
crowd.
They said it was a sign from above and Kidd should be released.
He wasn’t.
The spectacle of violence for the public was seen as the best way of deterring criminal
acts.
The more barbaric, the better, was the reasoning.
Sometimes tens of thousands of people saw the execution, which made the authorities
happy.
But as Michael Foucault pointed out in his book, “Discipline and Punish”, this could
backfire.
After all, a too-brutal monarch or government might anger the public and impel them to riot.
Moreover, the person that suffered the horrendous punishment could become a kind of martyr.
This is important when we talk about the gibbet.
As you’ll soon discover, it was just too distasteful for some people to stomach.
After Kidd was hanged, his body was taken to another place where it was fastened inside
an iron cage.
That cage was fixed to strong wooden beams and hung over the River Thames.
Passersby were able to see the rotting flesh and for a while, take in the revolting odor
of putrefaction.
Moreover, anyone sailing down the Thames might also look at it and be put off piracy.
So, the gibbet was very unpleasant, and it was supposed to be.
It served as a warning for budding criminals, mirroring the caution found above Dante’s
Gates of Hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Ok, let’s now look at some historical examples of how the gibbet was used.
What the English did was hardly a unique invention.
For centuries enemies of various states were killed and left to hang while rotting.
That happened all the time throughout the ages as a means to scare encroaching armies.
It wasn’t much different from leaving people to die on crucifixes.
The English just took this kind of thing to another level.
As you already know, it was popular in England in the 18th century, which was a time in which
England embraced what was called the “Bloody Code.”
Back in those dark days, you could have been executed for what we now called a misdemeanor.
For the very worst crime, one against the state, known as treason, a man was usually
hanged, drawn, and quartered, while a woman was burned at the stake.
For the male, he was hanged slowly, after which he was usually emasculated (that means
he lost his sex organ), eviscerated (that means his bowels were ripped out, sometimes
burned in front of him), and only then was he beheaded and cut into four pieces.
This happened to William Wallace, a Scotsman you might have seen Mel Gibson play in the
not-very-accurate movie, Braveheart.
After Wallace was captured by the English he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the
way that we’ve just described.
After he was dead, his head was dipped in tar and stuck on London bridge.
The tarring was to preserve the head for as long as possible so the greatest number of
people could see it.
His two brothers’ heads later joined his on the same bridge, but the English weren’t
done with making an example of Wallace.
His severed limbs went on tour, with one of them making its way up north to the city of
Newcastle.
Three other limbs ended up at separate places in Scotland, and each was exhibited where
the public could see it.
This is when the gibbet came in handy.
Now you’ve heard of people being hanged in metal cages and you’ve heard how body
parts might have been tarred and hanged on a gibbet, but this still wasn’t formally
written into English law.
It was more an act of official savagery.
Then came the Murder Act of 1751, which decreed that any and all murderers should never be
buried.
The law stated that after execution, “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy
be added”.
The further terror was supposed to act as a deterrent for criminals.
The law stipulated that after the person had been executed their body had to go to the
gibbet for public view, hung up by chains.
The other option was public dissection.
It happened to a man named John Breads, although just before the law was passed.
He’d mistakenly murdered a man he thought was the mayor of Rye, a town in southern England.
As the story goes, the mayor, James Lamb, had given his brother-in-law, Allen Grebell,
his mayoral cloak to wear.
Breads killed him, thinking he was Lamb.
Breads was executed.
His body was subsequently fastened into an iron cage which was suspended on a post located
at a place called Gibbet Marsh.
It stayed there for 20 years, which was a stark reminder to anyone passing of what happens
if you kill someone.
An example on a much bigger scale was the story of the Hawkhurst gang.
This was a large outfit of Englishmen that earned their crust from robberies and smuggling.
They also committed the odd murder, especially when someone got in the way of their business.
This was old school organized crime, a kind of early mafia enterprise where sit-downs
might have happened in the Dog and Partridge inn.
They actually murdered a man there, another reason why the authorities had to make an
example of them.
That they did after 75 members of the gang were arrested.
Some were transported to far-off lands and others were hanged.
14 of them were hanged and later hung in chains from the gibbet.
Scholars have since written that crimewaves back then were the reason for more people
being gibbetted, although it came at quite the cost for the authorities.
For instance, creating those metal cages where the dead were housed wasn’t a cheap undertaking.
The cage which held the body had to be very solid iron because keeping a person suspended
around 30 feet in the air was not always easy, especially if the victim was on the large
side.
Then the gibbet post had to be made climb-proof because people would try and take the body
down or kids might try to get up and mess with the dead person.
This all took time and effort.
Historians now say there was never a one size fits all with the cages and so blacksmiths
had to measure the condemned so they might create the perfect cage.
Some of them certainly didn’t look easy to make, and blacksmiths weren’t exactly
trained to make them.
Sometimes those cages were made to be slightly adjustable, and that came at more cost, as
did the fact the authorities asked the blacksmiths to make them so that they swung in the wind.
We actually found historical records showing the costs of gibbeting in the mid-18th century.
A carpenter named Richard Goodman charged 17 pounds, 14 shillings for wood beams used
for three gibbets.
He charged some more for transportation and fixing them in the ground.
Using a currency calculator, the value of 17 pounds in today’s money would be close
to 5,000 pounds, about $6,900.
James Beeding seemed to offer a pretty good deal, charging just 8 pounds, four shillings,
for one wooden post, the iron cage, as well as the chains.
Maybe he advertised his service as a one-stop shop.
There are other records of skilled men refusing to do any work because they thought the practice
was too barbaric.
As we said, a lot of people in England did not want to walk down the street for months
or years and have to look up at the remains of a dead person.
Such was the case with a man named John Swan, who was hanged in 1752 for murder.
He was then hung with chains from the gibbet, but the authorities said the location wasn’t
ideal because it was “in full view of some Gentlemen’s houses on the Forest.”
They moved Mr. Swan to a place called Buckets Hill, only for more gentlemen to complain
about the ghastly sight.
The authorities finally agreed on the place where the crime had taken place.
A similar thing happened when Abraham Tull and William Hawkins were strung up in Berkshire.
A wealthy local woman, know only as Mrs. Brocas of Beaurepaire, said passing the gibbet on
her daily drives in her carriage was very distressing.
She was rich enough to get the thing moved.
Not only that, families of people in the gibbet could be expected to see their loved ones
for years, decades even.
There was always a reminder for them of their loss and the shame they felt about what their
loved one had done.
Can you imagine having to walk past your dead brother every day?
What also happened was animals would enjoy the flesh of the condemned, and after a while
bits of them would drop off onto the floor.
Once the flesh was gone, sometimes bones would spill out of the cage.
It certainly wasn’t cool when you had to take your children past the gibbet site.
In the end, only the larger bones and the skull were left in the cage, which also didn’t
look too pleasant for the more sensitive folks.
When people picked up the newspaper and read these lines, many of them thought, “Oh God,
not another one.”
One newspaper printed this: “Yesterday morning about eight o’clock
Richard Ashcraft and John Cook, the two smugglers, were carried under a strong detachment of
the guards, from Newgate to Tyburn, and executed pursuant to their sentence; after which their
bodies were hung on a gibbet at Shepherd’s Bush.”
This is a very busy part of London today, but in the past was where shepherds left their
sheep when heading to the market.
Main roads ran out of there, and where you might come across the BBC today, back then
you could have found a series of gibbets holding cages of dead men.
In fact, several locations around London were chosen, usually ones that were major routes
for travelers.
We won’t go into all the cases we found in London, but will add that if you lived
in that city in the mid-1700s or early 1800s and you traveled a fair bit, there was a good
chance you saw a fair few dangling cadavers.
It was almost unavoidable.
Smugglers, highwaymen, murderers, were aplenty, and many of them did not go quietly into the
night after they were executed.
It didn’t just happen in London, either.
Up north in Durham, a miner named William Jobling murdered colliery owner and local
magistrate, Nicholas Fairles.
He was hanged and paraded around the town, after which he was gibbeted.
There’s a clear description that exists of how it went down.
It goes like this: “The body was encased in flat bars of iron
of two and a half inches in breadth, the feet were placed in stirrups, from which a bar
of iron went up each side of the head, and ended in a ring by which he was suspended;
a bar from the collar went down the breast, and another down the back…”
Much has been written about this story.
The victim was a mine owner at a time when miners were treated worse than animals, and
the perpetrator started working in those mines around the age of 10.
One day Jobling, drunk and out of work, held out a cap to Fairles and asked for a donation
so he could go get some ale.
Fairles refused and was subsequently attacked by Jobling and two other men.
He died from his injuries ten days later.
The authorities saw this as a vulgar man killing a perfectly fine gentleman, about the worst
crime of all back then besides killing a monarch.
When the judge sentenced Jobling to death and the gibbet, he said, “I hope to God
it will be a warning to others”.
He said he also hoped “the sight of it will have a due effect on the prisoner’s companions.”
As in France, the wealthy were always worried about the wrath of the people they exploited.
Jobling’s supporters, which was just about everyone from the poorer communities, felt
he’d been treated harshly.
After just one month of swinging in the cage, his body went missing.
It was likely his friends that gave him a proper burial, risking 7 years of transportation
if they were caught.
In the end, Jobling became a hero to those who risked their lives down the pit or risked
being arrested or killed for labor organizing.
What might come as a surprise to you is all this gibbeting and pulling people apart didn’t
do anything to lessen the amount of crime in England.
In fact, since the English got really tough on crime starting around 1750, the crime rate
just kept going up and up.
Life was tough, and it certainly was for many being worked almost to death during the rise
of the Industrial Revolution.
Crime was just a consequence of the hard times.
It turned out that extreme punishments did nothing to stop crime rates from going through
the roof in the early 1800s.
The gibbet evidently wasn’t working.
1810 to 1820 was a bumper decade for crime in England, a time coinciding with rising
food costs, war with France, lots of unemployment, and general widespread poverty.
Even if you had a job, factory life could be horrid and sometimes barely paid enough
to survive.
People were desperate enough to commit crimes, even with the threat of harsh punishments.
There is one story of a 16-year old girl inviting a friend to a picnic.
For some reason, she chose the gibbet as the place to eat the sandwiches and cake.
There she killed her friend by feeding her poisoned cake.
She did it because she wanted that girl’s job.
But what’s important here is the symbolism of doing it under the gibbet.
It was hardly the crime deterrent it was supposed to be.
Still, those who didn’t ever need to worry about money kept appeasing the masses by promising
to get tougher on crime rather than talk about more opportunities and better standards of
living for the poor.
They kept getting tougher and more people went to the gibbet as the 1800s rolled on.
In 1832, a bookbinder named James Cook was accused of killing someone who’d lent him
money.
The newspaper wrote about his execution and gibbeting, saying:
“The head was shaved and tarred, to preserve it from the action of the weather; and the
cap in which he had suffered was drawn over his face.
On Saturday afternoon his body, attired as at the time of his execution, having been
firmly fixed in the irons necessary to keep the limbs together, was carried to the place
of its intended suspension.”
The vast majority of the thousands of people who’d turned up to watch this spectacle
were appalled by what they saw.
They said as much to the authorities, talking about English barbarism and relics from the
darker past.
People echoed these sentiments all over England, which was one reason why the English stopped
doing it.
Human rights was starting to become a thing.
In 1837, Australians said the same after they saw the rotting body of murderer John McKay
hang from a gibbet.
There were other instances of gibbeting around the world, mainly in places where the English
had landed and conquered.
One case that stands out is the case of the husband killer, Marie-Josephte Corriveau.
This takes us to Canada when in 1760 the British defeated France and conquered what was then
called New France.
The victory meant it was the Brits who investigated crimes in Quebec City, one which led to lady
Corriveau being executed.
The English wanted to make an example of her, so they gibbetted her, too.
Her specially made iron cage exists today.
She was executed by hanging on April 18, and then her body was hung up for the public to
see on the junction of the streets that are now called Saint-Joseph Street and De l'Entente
Boulevard.
It was up there for just over a month, taken down because too many people complained about
the stink and sight of a rotting corpse.
This was a strange case from the start, since the English did not put condemned women in
the gibbet.
Why you might wonder?
It seems the Brits were rather coy about putting a woman’s body up there where her private
parts were exposed.
Considering she’d just been killed and was supposed to rot in a cage, it is perplexing
to us modern folks that this would bother the English and breach their finely crafted
rules on common decency.
France was no better, sometimes burying women alive because hanging them was rude.
As for the gibbeting of African slaves in some of Britain’s colonies, that was even
worse.
In 1736, in Antigua, six slaves were gibbeted alive, meaning they hung in the air until
they died from thirst, hunger, and exposure.
There are many cases around the same time of white plantation owners doing the same
to slaves in Jamaica, both men, and women.
We also found one report that said slaves in what would become the United States had
rebelled, which led to men being “hung alive in chains in the town” in New York City.
Now you need to watch, “Executions That Went Horribly Wrong.”
Or, have a look at...