The Revd Wm. M. Cooper wrote in a nineteenth-century standard work on corporal punishment (A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, London, William Reeves, 1877). In 1858 special regulations were issued for the punishment of naval cadets. They were not to be flogged according to the Mutiny Act, but simply with a birch rod, such as is used in public schools. Four cadets of the Illustrious having been guilty of such gross misconduct as would justify their dismissal from the service, the admiral in command suggested that they should be flogged with a birch rod... and the Admiralty sanctioned that course. In the circular issued from Whitehall to all commanders-in-chief, captains, and other commanding officers, it was enjoined that boys should not be flogged as formerly with a cat, but that in all cases where the offences could not be lightly passed over they should be punished in a similar manner to that which is in use at our large public schools – viz., by birching – and that in no case should more than twenty-four cuts be inflicted.
Birching had long been a standard punishment for boys, especially at the Royal Hospital School in Greenwich. Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell had until 1850 housed men, women and children; thereafter it was restricted to adult male offenders over the age of seventeen. Despite its aspirations to be a more humanitarian prison (it was designed by reformer John Howard), it became notorious for its strict regime of silence and its use of the treadmill. A cat o’ nine tails had been used on boys where Sergeant Adams the warden spoke of its effectiveness when he compared it to the birch. Acting as a witness for the Report of the Reformatory Schools Committee, 1856 he noted:
The punishment of flogging boys with the cat-o-nine-tails ought to be abolished not only as being too cruel but as being one which boys do not care about. We have substituted at Middlesex whipping with a birch rod, and boys who laugh at being put into a dungeon, and doubly laugh at flogging with a cat-o-nine-tails are upon their knees blubbering and praying not to be flogged with a birch rod – it deters them more than anything. I often sentence a boy given a month’s imprisonment to be well birched at the end of the first fortnight, so as to keep the terror over his mind.
Boys were birched during the daily exercise hour at Coldbath Fields. On some occasions it was so severe that that their yells could be heard through the window of a punishment cell on one of the top floors.
10
Changing Attitudes
Debates over deterrence, retribution and appropriate punishments for criminal acts have continued unabated over the centuries. Today we would recognize the issues that plagued earlier generations: a perception that crime is increasing, the law is too soft, prisons are overcrowded and punishments are not severe enough. Reformers argued about the purpose of punishment. Was it about making the criminal pay or reforming them, or both?
Before the nineteenth century people had gathered in their thousands around the scaffold or pillory to either vent their anger towards the condemned or to watch with discernment or sympathy. Public displays of barbarous torture, pain and death were the largest of all attended events. The whole ritual surrounding the execution – the procession to the gallows; selling of food, drink and broadsheets; opportunities for pickpockets; drunken revelry and fights; the last dying speech followed by the agonising death throes of the condemned; the undignified scramble for the dead body by agents of the anatomists and the family of the deceased – were all part of the performance. Public executions were a regular feature of London life. All this took part against a background of no organized police force, and when prisons functioned as holding places until the accused were punished.
Henry Grattan (1746-1820), MP and campaigner for legislative reform, wrote, ‘The more you hang, the more you transport, the more you inflame, disturb, and disaffect’. Henry Fielding (1707-1754), writer and legal reformer, also pointed out the disregard that many showed towards the scaffold. Commenting on the execution of eleven felons at Tyburn, he said, ‘In real truth, the executions of criminals, as at present conducted, serve, I apprehend, a purpose diametrically opposite to that for which they were designed; and tend rather to inspire the vulgar with a contempt of the gallows rather than a fear of it’.
For many critics, the regular displays of violence in the pillory, whippings or public executions only hardened the attitudes of onlookers. Frequent exposure would ‘harden the heart’ wrote one commentator in 1773. Others asked whether repeated viewings of such violence would make a person ‘become indifferent to the spectacle’. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784 wrote that ‘those who attend hangings go with the same ease and indifference they would go to a race’. Charles Dickens, who attended the execution of Francois Courvoisier, the valet who murdered Lord William Russell, wrote of the crowd, ‘...no sorrow, so salutary terror, no observance, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’.
The ritual of being drawn to the place of execution.
Between the Restoration in 1660 and the mid-nineteenth century, there were significant changes in criminal law, in the reform of prisons and in punishments. The introduction of lawyers as prosecuting and defence counsel was a significant development. But it was in the system of punishments that the biggest changes were seen. As the population of London grew and the metropolis expanded, levels of crime increased in response. The number of acts that carried the death penalty, the ‘Bloody Code’, was in excess of 200 by the turn of the nineteenth century. New methods of punishment were introduced, such as the hulks and transportation. In the nineteenth century new prisons with the purpose of incarnating criminals were built, such as Pentonville and Millbank and after 1829 the Metropolitan Police force was established. From 1830 the number of capital offences had diminished and the last public execution took pace in 1868 outside Newgate Prison.
Blue lamp indicating the Metropolitan Police Force.
Scotland Yard, Whitehall. New forces in fighting crime.
Institutional punishments continued, although greater checks on abuses, especially against young children, were put in place. The death penalty for murder was effectively ended under the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act in 1965. In 1998 under Section 36 of the Crime and Disorder Act the last two offences carrying the death penalty in the UK – piracy with violence and treason – were finally abolished. This brought an end to a practice that had existed as a common punishment in Britain for over 1,000 years.
Table of Contents
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
1 Changing Punishment Through the Centuries
2 The Prisons of London
3 The Hulks
4 Places of Execution
5 Methods and Instruments of Torture and Execution
6 The Pillory
7 Religious Sanctions
8 Social Sanctions
9 Pleasurable Punishments
10 Changing Attitudes
Olde London Punishments Page 13
