Olde London Punishments

by David Brandon

  The infamous Tyburn gallows received many victims during the sixteenth century as a result of the religious changes that took place. For many Catholics, Mary, Queen of the Scots was seen as the stronger claimant to the throne and she became the focus for a number of plots which were intended to remove Elizabeth. The famous triangular gallows at Tyburn, the ‘Triple Tree’, was erected in 1571. It stood nearly 18ft high and prompted the poet John Taylor (1578-1653) to declare that ‘Tyburn doth deserve before them all, The title and addition capital, Of Arch or great Grand Gallows of our Land, Whilst all the rest like ragged Lackeys stand’. The triangular frame of the gallows was capable of hanging eight people on each beam and up to twenty-four people at one time. It towered above the throngs of the assembled crowd. The road between Tyburn and the City (now Oxford Street) was particularly busy on execution days when it would have carried traffic going west to the gallows and also cattle going to Smithfield Market to the east.

  Tyburn gallows shown in Rocque’s Map of London, 1746. The area is still rural.

  Tyburn Way, Marble Arch. Very few reminders of Tyburn exist.

  The first known execution on the triangular gallows was recorded on 1 June 1571: ‘the saide [John] Story was drawn upon an herdell from the Tower of London unto Tiborn, where was prepared for him a newe payre of gallows made in triangular maner’. (Harleian Misc. iii. 1809: 100-8)

  John Story was imprisoned in 1563 for his activities persecuting Protestants under Mary. Seven years later, after escaping, Story was captured and brought back to England. The crowd at the gallows was hostile and observers noted that ‘he was the object of general execration and care was taken that he should suffer all the torments of that horrible sentence’. However, the prisoner managed to leave his mark: when the executioner was in the process of disembowelling him, Story summoned sufficient strength to raise himself up and aim a blow at his tormentor.

  In many instances the executioner had some degree of discretion on how far he might inflict the punishment. He might decide whether or not to strangle the condemned before proceeding to the more barbaric aspects of disembowelling. However, there were many instances where the punishment of disembowelling was carried out without the mercy of death by hanging. Many more Catholic martyrs went to their death at Tyburn after John Story, including Thomas Woodhouse, a priest from Lincolnshire, John Nelson, Thomas Sherwood and Everard Hanse.

  The gallows were considered to be a place of great spiritual and magical power, particularly in relation to martyrdom. For example, the hands of the executed were believed to possess curative powers, and there are many examples of people stroking themselves with a condemned man’s hands after the execution. It was believed that the hangman was endowed with particular powers because of his relationship with the dead. Even touching the gallows brought certain dangers with it, and artisans who were involved with erecting the gallows had to go through a ritualised ceremony in order to be protected from the taint. The body of the condemned was thought by some to convey magical powers akin to the power of the King’s touch – which was reputed to heal, and was synonymous with Jesus curing the ill by the touch of his hand.

  A number of Catholics were executed at Tyburn in December 1581, most notably the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion. Campion and two other Catholic priests were dragged through the muddy streets to Tyburn where a large crowd was waiting. Campion sang all the way to his execution and even when he was cut down from the rope he stood upright and shouted, ‘Lord, Lord, Lord’ whilst struggling with the executioners.

  In 1584 George Haydock, John Nutter, Thomas Hemerford, James Fenn and John Munden were accused of plotting against Elizabeth. They were drawn on hurdles with five other priests to Tyburn. The cart was then driven away, and the officer was said to have pulled the rope several times before Haydock fell. He was then disembowelled while alive. A similar fate awaited the other priests. One, James Fenn, a Somerset man about forty years of age and a widower with two children, was stripped of all his clothing with the exception of his shirt. After the cart was driven away his shirt was pulled off his back, so that he hung stark naked, ‘whereat the people muttered greatly’.

  Between 1581 and 1603, one hundred and eighty Catholics were executed for treason, most of these at Tyburn.

  In 1595 the poet Robert Southwell was hanged at Tyburn. Southwell had ministered to Catholics and as a result was subjected to torture and three years’ confinement in a dungeon before he was brought to trial and sentenced to the usual punishment of hanging and quartering. His torture had involved being hung from a wall by his hands, with a sharp circle of iron round his wrist pressing on his artery, his legs bent backwards and his heels tied to his thighs. When he arrived at Tyburn he was lifted on to a cart to be hanged. The hangman slowly strangled Southwell and when an officer began to cut the rope of the still breathing priest, Lord Mountjoy and other witnesses interrupted and told him to let Southwell alone to die. He was said to have inspired sympathy on the gallows, and some of the crowd appealed to the executioner to let him hang until he was dead.

  The remains of a martyr’s body were often rescued and, in some cases, saved for relics. For example Oliver Plunkett, Catholic primate of Ireland, was sentenced to death for plotting to aid a French invasion of Ireland in 1678. Plunkett was drawn through the City of London to Tyburn and hanged, drawn and quartered. His bowels were taken out and burnt before him, his head was cut off and his body divided into four quarters and disposed of. His head was rescued by friends and now remains preserved in the Catholic Church of St Peter’s in Drogheda in the Irish Republic.

  In the case of the Catholic Edmund Gennings at Tyburn, the executioner was requested to show the visitors pieces of flesh to satisfy their curiosity. In Genning’s case the hangman, ‘tooke up one of his [Gennings’s] forequarters by the arme, which when he had shewed to the People, he contemptuosly flung it downe into the baskets agayne wherin it lay, and tooke up the head that they might see his face’.

  Plaque to the Tyburn Martyrs, Tyburn Convent.

  Tyburn Convent, Bayswater Road.

  There were occasions when the performance of the executioner drew theatre-like responses from the crowd. The crowd’s sympathies might sway depending on the ways in which the condemned reacted to their punishment, or through the speeches. In 1601 after the priest Mark Barkworth had been quartered, it was noticed that constant kneeling had hardened his knees. Someone in the crowd picked up one of Barkworth’s legs after the quartering and called out, ‘Which of you Gospellers can show such a knee?’

  The present Tyburn Convent on Bayswater Road, which was built in 1903, contains a number of relics including linen and straw stained with the blood of five Jesuit martyrs executed on 20 June 1679; bone from the finger of St John Roberts, hanged, drawn and quartered on 10 December 1610; fingernail of Thomas Holland, executed on 12 December 1642; sliced vertebrae of John Lockwood, executed 1642; and a bloody cloth from the robes of Oliver Plunkett.

  A particular development in scaffold ritual from the sixteenth century was the last dying speech. Dying speeches were intended not only to demonstrate that crime did not pay but also to reinforce the desire for religious conformity during the Reformation. Gallows speeches were written and arranged in order that the condemned would proclaim their guilt, and intended as a warning to the crowds of the dangers of transgression and the need to uphold the virtues of the monarch and the State. The speech would vary from a plea for forgiveness to a claim of innocence or the opportunity to make a religious pronouncement. In many cases the speech involved a condemnation of the authorities. Some prisoners remained in silence while others were so drunk they rambled incoherently.

  Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, said before her execution on 19 May 1536:

  Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and cond
emned to die, but I pray God save the King and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.

  Lincoln’s Inn Fields, scene of the execution of the Babington Plotters.

  At Lincoln’s Inn Fields fourteen conspirators involved in the Babington Plot were hanged, drawn and quartered in 1587. Sir Anthony Babington, a zealous Roman Catholic, had hatched the plan, but he and his fellow plotters fell foul of Sir Francis Walsingham’s spy network. Babington, as ringleader, was hanged first and had the misfortune still to be conscious when he had his penis cut off and was eviscerated. The discovery of this plot effectively sealed the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was executed later in the same year at Fotheringhay Castle near Peterborough.

  Witchcraft

  The sixteenth century saw important developments in the persecution of ‘witches’. From about the mid-fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, between 40,000 and 60,000 individuals were tried as witches and condemned to death in Europe. Of that number, as high as three-quarters of the victims were women. In England witchcraft persecutions really began in 1563 with the statute of Elizabeth I, but did not really become fully developed until the reign of James I (r.1603-1625). A further Witchcraft Act in 1604 broadened the penalty of death to anyone who invoked evil spirits or communed with familiar spirits.

  Witches were hanged in England rather than burned, and were not subject to the same extremes of torture as in Europe (although elements of torture were not entirely absent). Nor were there mass executions in England such as those in France and Germany. Particular to English witchcraft trials were the ideas of ‘pricking’ to locate the Devil’s mark, the use of ‘possessed’ children as accusers, counter-magic, demonic possession and the belief in so-called familiars (animals, domestic pets). After the Restoration in 1660 trials for witchcraft in England started to decline.

  Middlesex and London did not have a Quarter Sessions and Assizes. Sessions of the Peace were held twice a year as well as Sessions of Inquiry. Hence those charged with witchcraft in Middlesex could be tried in the Session of Peace for Middlesex or Westminster, the Sessions of Gaol Delivery of prisoners from Newgate or the Old Bailey. After the Witchcraft Act of 1563, both Margaret Harckett (1585) and Anne Kerke (1599) were executed at Tyburn. After further revisions to the Act in 1604, Elizabeth Sawyer and Joan Peterson were executed in 1621 and 1652 respectively.

  Sixty-year-old widow Margaret Harkett from Stanmore was the servant of William Goodwinne and her case is recorded in the contemporary pamphlet The Severall factes of Witch-crafte, where she is described as ‘this ungodly woman... this witch’. She had been accused of a series of incidents which were said to have brought misfortune on a number of her neighbours. Margaret was arrested and brought before the justice for examination. She was then committed to Newgate where she remained until her trial and execution in 1585.

  In 1599 Anne Kerke of Broken Wharf, London, was alleged to have disposed of a number of children by means of magic. Anne had attended the funeral of Anne Naylor, for whose mysterious death she had also been blamed. When Anne Kerke was offered no share in the traditional doles for the poor she was ‘sorely vexed’ and directed her magic against another member of the Naylor family. At her trial the justice tried to disprove the idea that a witch’s hair could not be cut by taking ten or twelve hairs from her head. However, a sergeant who also attempted to cut the hairs with a pair of scissors claimed they had turned round in his hand, and the edges were so ‘battered, turned and spoiled, that they would not cut anything’. Still determined, he attempted to burn the hair, but by all accounts the fire flew away from it.

  The Witch of Edmonton was first performed in 1621 at the Cockpit in Drury Lane and took as its subject Elizabeth Sawyer. Elizabeth was brought to Newgate for causing the death of a neighbour by witchcraft. The court was unsure how to proceed with the evidence when a local JP, Arthur Robinson, intervened and told the court that Elizabeth had a mark upon her body and this would confirm the suspicion of witchcraft. The witch’s mark, also called a Devil’s mark, was ‘proof’ that an individual was a witch. On the advice of the JP the bench ordered officers to bring three women to do a body search of Elizabeth. The women claimed that they found a teat the length and a half of a finger. This was considered sufficient evidence to condemn Elizabeth.

  Implements for witch pricking.

  The instruments of torture used on witches.

  She did not confess easily. Her confirmation had to be extracted with great labour. Her reluctance to confess would have further confirmed in the minds of many that she fitted the pattern of a typical witch with her swearing, cursing and blaspheming. Many Londoners, especially those who witnessed her execution, would have known of Elizabeth’s case because of the many accounts produced about her.

  In 1652 Joan Peterson, the ‘Wapping Witch’, had been asked to act as an alibi in what was a complex series of deceits involving the death of Lady Powell. Joan refused to be involved and was subsequently arrested and had her house searched. Despite a lack of evidence, she was subsequently charged with using witchcraft to kill Lady Powell. Although she strongly denied the charge, claiming that she had never even met Powell, she was also subjected to a search at her trial – and predictably was found to have a ‘teat’ in her ‘secret parts’. Many were bribed to testify against her and the trial was clearly rigged. Joan continued to protest her innocence, though she was offered a pardon if she would confess her crime. (During this particular offer Joan responded by hitting one of the officers and making his nose bleed.) On 12 April 1652 Joan was brought to Tyburn. The minister pleaded with her to confess, to which the executioner replied that ‘he might be ashamed to trouble a dying woman’. Joan, an innocent victim, was hanged.

  Scold’s Bridle

  A scold’s bridle was a torture device for women, resembling an iron muzzle or cage for the head with an iron curb projecting into the mouth and resting above the tongue. To add to the pain, the curb was often studded with spikes so as to torture the tongue if it dared move.

  It was also used as corporal punishment for other offences, such as for female workhouse inmates. One is on display at the Tower of London. Another is at Walton-on-Thames, where it is displayed in the vestry of the church, dated 1633, with the inscription ‘Chester presents Walton with a bridle to curb women’s tongues that talk too idle’.

  ‘The Bawdy Courts’ – Church Courts

  Alongside the criminal and civil courts and the courts of equity, there was a whole network of some 300 or 400 ecclesiastical courts whose activities affected many aspects of our ancestors’ lives. Church courts existed from the Norman Conquest and ended in the mid-nineteenth century.

  For centuries, the staple of Church court business were moral offences. These included slander, unseemly behaviour in church, working or rowdy drinking on a Sunday, neglect to have children baptised, simony, heresy, drunkenness, offences committed in the churchyard, witchcraft, usury, adultery, fornication, incest, blasphemy and bastardy. The most common entry in Church court correction records relates to ‘ante-nuptial fornication’, which usually meant the wife was pregnant at marriage and that a child was born within six months of the wedding. The following charges were also commonly made: fornication between unmarried persons; indecent behaviour towards females; mutual male (and female) masturbation; coition with animals; communication of venereal diseases; lewd behaviour (which also included the singing of bawdy songs); keeping a brothel; being a whore; and incest.

  Scold’s bridle.

  It was the range of sexual offences that gave Church courts the more familiar nickname of ‘the bawdy court’.

  In The Friar’s Tale Chaucer wrote about a fine Archdeacon who would boast, That Leche
ry was what he punished most...

  And ere the Bishop caught them with his crook,

  Down they went in the Archdeacon’s book;

  For he had Jurisdiction, after Detection,

  And Power to Administer Correction.

  All these offences were considered to be sins punishable by exclusion from church or by excommunication. These penalties could only be redeemed by penance (expressions of moral repentance), which the Church courts imposed on those found guilty. Penances involved some form of public confession and humiliation, such as standing in church in a white sheet or in sack-cloth, processing bare-foot or being publicly flogged. In many cases the accused was suspended from communion or church services. For pre-nuptial pregnancies the punishment was open confession in church. As for bigamy, which was not a civil offence before 1603, many couples ran away and married again. Buggery and bestiality carried the death penalty, and for having an illegitimate child the penalty was a hefty fine large enough to be financially ruinous for the majority of people. Before 1700 both mother and father were often stripped naked to the waist and whipped through the street at a cart’s tail. It is hardly surprising that infanticide (an offence in 1624) was often resorted to by desperate mothers.