The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  High treason not only includes offences against the king’s person but also clipping the coin of the realm. Many people try to supplement their income by shaving off a small amount of metal from the rim of a coin, normally by clipping it with a pair of pliers and then filing down the edge. These filings are then melted down and sold. When women are found guilty of this offence, they are normally burnt at the stake, in accordance with the medieval law of treason. Edward Conyers and his wife Jane are two such coin-clippers. One day in early 1683 Jane sends their daughter out to buy bread and other groceries with two recently clipped shillings. One of the tradesmen is suspicious of the coins and reports the girl to a constable, who questions her. The girl breaks down and confesses that her father clips coins and that they have files, shears and melting pots in their house. A warrant is issued, the tools are discovered and both Edward and his wife are arrested. Found guilty of high treason, they are both sentenced to death. They die on the same day: Edward is drawn and hanged; Jane is burnt to death.

  There are four different forms of petty treason: when a servant kills his or her master; when a child slaughters his or her parent; when a clergyman murders his bishop; and when a wife kills her husband. The first and last are by far the most common. In the last case, let’s consider the crime from a woman’s point of view. On the whole you don’t have a great deal of say in whom you marry; most fathers want to marry off their daughters as soon as they can, both those at the top end of society (to make family alliances) and those at the bottom (to alleviate the burden of having to support them). Therefore although in theory a bride can say ‘no’ at the altar, she is under enormous pressure to say ‘yes’, even if her intended spouse stinks, drinks, snores, spits, gambles, blasphemes and is unfaithful and abusive. Suppose she says ‘yes’ to a man whom she grows to despise. Suppose they have rows and he beats her. Imagine that, in the course of one of their fights, she grabs the nearest thing to hand in order to defend herself. Unfortunately for one young woman in this situation in London in 1662, she jabs her husband with a tobacco pipe and the stem breaks: a sharp fragment enters his body and he bleeds to death.17 At the trial it is plain to see that she struck her husband in anger and killed him, whether she meant to or not. She is guilty of petty treason, and there is only one punishment considered suitable.

  The woman is taken from the gaol where she is held to the place of execution in a cart. Thousands of people follow her along the way, shouting at her, if they feel the need to vent their feelings, especially if they are relatives of the deceased; others throw things, such as rotten eggs. At the place where the punishment is to be enacted, she is manhandled from the cart to the huge oak stake, set hard in the ground. There an empty tar barrel that has had the bottom knocked out of it is passed over her head. Chains are placed around her body, fastening her to the stake. A long thin rope is looped around her neck and threaded through a hole in the wood. A clergyman then speaks to her of the approaching moment of doom, to help her make peace with the Almighty and to ask her to address the crowd, repenting of her sin. He prays with her. When he withdraws, dry straw is pushed into the barrel and strewn on the ground around her. Faggots are piled on top of the straw and close to her body, inside the barrel. Beadles stand guard with long staffs, using them to push back the raucous crowd where necessary. All the while street vendors are shoving their way between the people, selling pies and bottles of beer, or printed broadsides carrying woodcuts of previous hangings and burnings. Many families have been waiting for hours to get a good view, their children scurrying around between the mass of people, bored with the delays. But now the waiting is over, and they stand open-mouthed as the executioner sets fire to the straw.

  When the flames rise, the faggots are alight and smoke is billowing around, the executioner may pull on the rope and strangle the condemned woman, her arms outstretched as she bids adieu to her friends in the crowd. As we have seen, in Scotland strangulation is a legal requirement of the sentence; in England it is not. Unless the king has forbidden it (as in the case of Elizabeth Gaunt), it is an act of mercy entirely at the executioner’s discretion. If she has committed a particularly heinous crime and the crowd wants to hear the woman scream as she burns, he may dispense with the rope altogether. This is what happens to the woman who kills her husband with a tobacco pipe. On other occasions the wind whips up the flames too quickly and the executioner has to back off and is unable to hold on to the rope, even if he intends to be merciful. On such occasions you will hear the terrified screams of the victim and the gasps of the crowd, and you will start to encounter sensations more primitive than any you have come across in any other walk of life – terrible smells and sounds, and the profound shock that the society that you are visiting will render down a human being to just so much meat and fat, and let her die in agony, until she is mere ashes and splintered bone.

  Men who are found guilty of petty treason, such as killing their employer, are ‘drawn and hanged’. The penalty for high treason is to be ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’. The ‘drawn’ bit of these sentences is the process of ‘drawing’ or dragging the condemned man to the gallows on a hurdle, so that he is humiliated in front of the crowd. If you are found guilty of high treason, the judge in court will declare that you shall be

  drawn upon a hurdle or sledge to the place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck and cut down immediately, that your privities and your entrails may be separated from your body and burnt before your face; your head shall be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters, to be disposed of according to the king’s good pleasure.18

  When a traitor’s head is cut off, it is held aloft immediately with a cry of ‘God save the king!’ Some traitors are allowed to have a linen cap placed over their face, so that when they are cut down from the scaffold, it is not their head but their heart that is first cut out and lifted for the public to applaud.19 The quartering involves cutting the corpse in half down the middle with a special broad-bladed axe, and then separating the chest of each half from the abdomen. In the case of political traitors, the four quarters of the torso, each with a limb attached, are set up above the gates of a town where the deceased is well known. Heads are put on spikes on London Bridge, the city gates and occasionally Temple Bar. It might strike you as utterly incongruous but it is a fact that in an age in which you can drink champagne and chocolate, listen to lectures by Isaac Newton and hear Purcell’s operas, bloody pieces of human corpse are still hooked up above the main roads into the cities.

  PUNISHMENTS FOR FELONIES

  Most people who are sentenced to death are simply hanged, just as they have been for hundreds of years. In some places the familiar one-armed gallows is the instrument; in London it is the three-sided timber structure, which enables a dozen or more people to be despatched simultaneously. Many condemned felons dress up especially for the occasion: you might consider putting on a hat, cuffs and nosegay to mark the day. Some men even dress as bridegrooms on the day of their death. However you choose to be attired, you will be taken on a cart from gaol with other condemned prisoners and a clergyman to the traditional place of execution. Expect a large crowd to have gathered to watch you die. Some spectators might also have dressed specially: if you are a handsome young criminal known for your dashing and romantic gestures – like Claude Duval, a highwayman who has been known to dance with the wives and daughters of the men he has robbed – you might depart this world watching girls wearing white dresses strewing flowers from baskets before you.20 Along the way you should be given a final quart of ale. When you arrive at the gallows you might be allowed to say a few words or read a speech, as long as you do not make a claim to innocence (if you do, you will be cut short). Then a blindfold will be placed over your eyes, a noose around your neck and, with a crack of the whip, the horse and cart will suddenly be driven away, leaving you suspended in mid-air, slowly strangling yourself with your body weight, bobbing against the bodies beside you. Friends might leap on to you,
hoping with such a sudden tug to break your neck. If they fail, the instinct to breathe will soon make your body twitch, which is called ‘dancing’ at the end of the rope.

  There are two principal variations on the above routine, reserved for special crimes. Pirates are hanged under the jurisdiction of the court of Admiralty. They are generally held in the Marshalsea Prison at Southwark and led across London Bridge and through the city to Wapping in a processional cart in front of huge crowds, like those heading to Tyburn. They too are given a quart of ale along the route and permitted to make a final speech. But they are hanged at the water’s edge, at low tide. Crowds watch from boats on the river as well as on the bank. After their dance of death has come to an end, they are not taken down from the gallows but left there for the tide to come in and wash over their heads three times. The worst of them are denied burial: their bodies are covered in tar and placed into a gibbet (a metal frame) and displayed for years to come, as a warning to others. It’s a grisly sight, when you look out from a boat heading upriver and see the sunken cheeks and black eye sockets of a man’s skull and the shrivelled skin on his bones, to the accompaniment of gently lapping water and the call of the gulls.

  The other variation is to hang felons near the scene of their crime – a penalty most commonly applied to highwaymen. Highway robbery strikes a particular nerve throughout the whole of society. The thought that it might befall you at any time while travelling about your regular business is horrifying. Consider the case of Mr Robert Leaver on 11 July 1699. You might think he has taken every precaution necessary to avoid being robbed. Although it is late – between 10 and 11 p.m. – he is travelling on horseback with a servant and is carrying a sword, as well as pistols. Nevertheless, he is accosted by a gang of highwaymen led by Edmond Tooll as he crosses Finchley Common. The highwaymen rob both men and take their horses. Tooll leads his victims away from the road and his men set about tying them up. But Mr Leaver refuses to lie face-down and they stamp on his face and stomach in the darkness. He pleads for his life but, as he does so, one of them shouts that his servant is undoing the rope that ties him. Tooll then shoots a pistol in the darkness and hits Mr Leaver in the back. He slowly bleeds to death over the course of the night and the following day. But he lives long enough to give evidence. When Tooll is apprehended some months later and brought to the Old Bailey for trial, he remarks that he should have stabbed Mr Leaver in the heart. Unsurprisingly, he is sentenced to be hanged in chains near the place of the crime.21 His body too is covered in tar and exhibited in a gibbet on the common. Sometimes the blackened corpses of highwaymen can be seen at waysides two or three decades after the execution, ‘shrunk to their bones’, as Pepys observes.22 Each one becomes a landmark in its own right, as everyone in the locality knows exactly where ‘the highwayman’ creaks in the wind, day and night, eerily watching the road for travellers in death as he watched it in life.

  If you are judged guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, then you will not be hanged for your crime. Instead you will be branded on the thumb (unless you are a peer of the realm, in which case you will not need to undergo this humiliation). Branding is also still used to denote those who have claimed Benefit of the Clergy. This is a remnant of the medieval custom whereby someone who could read was presumed to be a clergyman and therefore was not liable to be executed as a felon but instead was handed over to his bishop for punishment. These days many people are literate and lots of criminals claim Benefit of the Clergy for a first offence. They are not handed over to a bishop, but released; the branding on the thumb is to make sure they don’t claim the privilege twice. You’ll get a ‘T’ if you are convicted of theft, ‘M’ for manslaughter and ‘F’ for any other felony. You do still need to be able to read: if you claim Benefit of the Clergy and cannot read, then you will hang. Women are able to claim a limited version of the privilege but only when the stolen goods are worth less than 10s. In 1691, however, the law is changed: women henceforth can claim Benefit of the Clergy on the same terms as men. Don’t turn to crime too eagerly, though, whichever sex you are. From 1699 you will be branded on the left cheek for theft, close to the nose. On the plus side, it still saves your life. On the negative, it makes it very difficult to get a job – not to mention what it may do to your romantic prospects.

  Another alternative to hanging is transportation to the Plantations. From the 1660s certain classes of criminal who are sentenced to death can apply for a royal pardon in return to agreeing to serve a period as an indentured servant in the West Indies or America (although Maryland and Virginia refuse to accept condemned felons from 1670). The king’s motive in proposing this measure is, as we have seen, a labour shortage overseas. However, English judges see transportation as serving a useful legal purpose: it allows them to impose a sentence that is stricter than the mere branding of the thumb and yet more lenient than death. Consider the case of Philip Johnson, who is tried in April 1683 for killing an infant, John Hill, aged about six months:

  John Hill’s mother kept a public house in St Martins Parish, where of a Sunday night, at the beginning of the last month, Johnson came in to drink brandy, and after one quartern would have another, and go drink it in a private room with one he called his wife, which the land-lady refusing him, he threatened revenge before Saturday following. And on the Wednesday after about eight at night, came in a very rude manner, and breaking her windows, with other abuses, saying he had not yet revenge enough, the woman running to strike him, or defend her goods with the child in her arms, he struck it on the head with his stick, of which blow it died about seven hours after. Yet the jury being of the opinion that he had no premeditated malice to the child, but as it was accidentally in the woman’s arms whom he might strike at, they found it manslaughter.23

  It is easy to see why the judge in this case wants Philip Johnson to face a more severe punishment than mere branding, and so off he goes to Jamaica for a minimum of seven years.

  Transportation is also a useful sentence in cases where the law would normally require the death penalty but there are serious mitigating circumstances. In February 1682 Elizabeth Brown is found guilty of stealing a diamond ring, which she sells to a goldsmith. It easily counts as felony, for the value of the stolen item is far above 12d; so according to the law, she should be taken to Tyburn and hanged. But Elizabeth is not yet twelve years of age. The sentence of transportation is thus used as a means to give her a second chance at life, albeit with the next seven years working as an indentured servant overseas.24

  OTHER PUNISHMENTS

  If you do not enter a plea you will be sentenced to suffer peine forte et dure (‘strong and hard pain’), commonly referred to as ‘being pressed’. The full penalty is as follows:

  That the prisoner shall be sent to the prison from whence he came, and put into a mean house, stopped from light, and there shall be laid upon the bare ground without any litter, straw or other covering, and without any garment about him, saving something to cover his privy members and that he shall lie upon his back, and his head shall be covered, and his feet bare, and that one of his arms shall be drawn with a cord to one side of the house, and the other arm to the other side, and that his legs shall be used in the same manner, and that upon his body shall be laid so much iron and stone as he can bear, and more, and that the first day after he shall have three morsels of barley bread, without any drink, and the second day he shall drink so much as he can three times of the water which is next the prison door, saving running water, without any bread, and this shall be his diet until he die …25

  In 1673 David Pearce and William Stoaks refuse to hold up their hands at the Old Bailey; they feel they should be tried in their native counties, where their supposed crimes have been committed, with local juries. The judge gives them one day to decide whether they would prefer to be tried in London or pressed to death; on returning to court, they both raise their hands. James Parker similarly refuses to plead in 1676 and is pressed under several hundredweight of stone before he
gives in to the pain and asks to be tried. He is eventually hanged. Henry James refuses to plead in 1672 because his crime is ‘so odious both in the sight of God and man’ that he believes he does not deserve a trial. It takes him two days to die under the weight of the stones.26

  The need for criminals not just to suffer, but to be seen to suffer, explains why imprisonment is only rarely used as a punishment. If you lock people up, the public forgets about them, and that is no deterrent. Although there are lots of prisons up and down the country, they are mainly used for holding people while they await trial.

  There are some exceptions to this. Judges do occasionally impose a custodial sentence on a criminal but normally only in conjunction with some other penalty. Titus Oates’s penalty for falsifying a Catholic conspiracy, with fatal consequences, is to be heavily fined, imprisoned for life, unmercifully flogged and annually exhibited in the pillory. If you are sentenced to serve a term of imprisonment, bear in mind that this might amount to a death sentence in itself. Most prisons are crowded, unsanitary and disease-ridden. Typhus is not called ‘gaol fever’ for nothing. The Old Bailey is open to the elements precisely so that the diseases of Newgate Gaol do not enter the court with the prisoners. Gloucester Prison – within the walls of the old castle – is said to be the best in England, with plenty of air, a bowling green and a ‘neat garden’, according to Thomas Baskerville. He writes in 1683 that ‘if I were forced to go to prison and make my choice I would come hither’.27 Fair enough. But convicted criminals don’t get to choose where they are locked up. In 1661 Schellinks rides into Colchester and sees a very old man who has stolen a pig ‘chained to a post in the street, with heavy iron rings around his neck and feet, his feet locked together and with a chain fixed to his neck, asking passers by for alms to keep himself from starving, else he would die from hunger and thirst’.28 It seems the magistrates in Colchester have found a form of imprisonment that is publicly visible and thus can act as a deterrent.