The attention of historians is increasingly attracted by unusual plots - far from central events, but showing the life of people and society in a new light. One such plot recently became an exotic British execution: hanging a criminal in an iron cage on a high post. Why was such cruelty necessary? Why were folk festivals organized near the gallows? And what does the progress of medicine have to do with it, as well as English landscapes? This is described in one of the latest issues of the journal Landscape History.
Hanging in an iron cage or lattice (in English - gibbet) was widespread in medieval England, and then in the colonies. Most often, robbers, pirates, murderers and cattle snatchers were sentenced to this. After the 16th century, in England itself, they stopped hanging alive - such a punishment, a cross between torture and execution, remained in the Caribbean and American colonies, where slaves were subjected to it.
A short chain hung from a high (10 meters and more) wooden post with a crossbar on top. An iron lattice or cage was attached to it. They were very different - from a simple chain with a collar to complex anthropomorphic structures that fix all parts of the body. The calculation was for the corpse to sway in the wind, making characteristic sounds, attracting flies and birds.
They were executed in England either on specially designated places (usually on the outskirts of settlements), or on a hastily put up gallows right at the scene of the crime - so that the locals would rejoice at the retribution. However, for hanging in a cage, the corpse, after being treated with a special preservative, was taken to another place - under guard, so as not to allow accomplices or relatives of the executed person to recapture the body.
Intimidation and Science
As archaeologists are well aware, the unusual nature of the burial usually indicates a violent death - as, for example, among the swamp people of northern Europe of the Iron Age (criminals or victims of bloody rituals thrown into the swamps), or among those suspected of witchcraft and vampirism. And in modern times (XVI-XIX centuries), those who violated the law were not buried like everyone else - they were buried at the side of the road or in a special cemetery, they pierced the corpse with a stake and the like.
It is curious that soon enough, scientific interest is added to the desire to take revenge on the criminal and superstitious fears of him: the executed become the main, if not the only source of biological material for the increasingly numerous corps of doctors and teachers of medicine. In England, this unity of the medieval desire to punish the body of a criminal and educational concern for the needs of science was manifested in the Murder Act of 1752.
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"A man gallops past a gibbet" (lithograph by William Clerk)
Image: Wellcome Library, London
Rampant criminality in the country, constant murders, especially in the new metropolis - London … The list of crimes for which the death penalty was imposed in the 18th century expanded from 50 positions to 220, and as a result, the gallows itself did not frighten anyone. Legislators had to extend the punishment beyond death: all those executed were ordered either to be given for dissection, or to be suspended in a cage for an indefinite period (and people of that time were afraid of the prospect of going under the anatomist's knife much more).
The judge chose the death penalty - and judging by the statistics, most often in favor of anatomy. In any case, 79 percent of the 1151 executed in 1752-1832 suffered just such a fate. According to historians, pirates, smugglers, robbers of mail carriages (that is, "personal" enemies of the state) were usually doomed to be hung in a cage. This did not threaten female criminals: their corpses were too rare and were always sent to doctors (as were the corpses of blacks and those with unusual anatomical features).
Scenic execution landscape
But the main task of being suspended in a cage as punishment intimidating and “instructing” people was to adequately integrate into the local landscape. Often in the sentences they demanded to hang the corpses in chains near the scene of the crime - murder or robbery on the highway. If the gibbet was placed at the house of the criminal, this sight aggravated the grief of the relatives and for a long time retained the stigma on the family. Therefore, for example, the family of Thomas Wildey, hanged near Coventry in 1734, begged the sheriff to remove the cage with the corpse, since the memory of his crimes scares the neighbors away and does not allow them to practice their craft.
Pillar from a gibbet near the village of Combe, Berkshire
Photo: Pam Brophy / geograph.org.uk
In addition, the authorities sought to maximize the visibility of the corpse: not only did the cage hang on a high post, they also tried to put it on a hill or other natural elevation so that it could be seen from several kilometers away. If the cells at the crossroads of busy roads served as a warning for robbers, then on the seashore they frightened pirates and smugglers.
The Admiralty Gibbets were seen at the Thames estuary by all who arrived in London by sea. The residents of Portsmouth, for example, remember well John Aitken, the terrorist who committed a series of arson attacks on the docks of the Navy on behalf of the American states fighting for independence. The cage with Aitken's corpse (he was executed in 1777) stood for many years and became an important coastal sign: so, in 1779, a certain midshipman Murphy was "hanged, and his corpse was cut into pieces and buried under a gibbet, where John the painter hangs in chains" …
Gibbets on the banks of the Thames (engraving by William Hogarth)
Photo: Heritage-Images / Globallookpress.com
Corpses and gingerbread
Paradoxically, being suspended in an iron cage has become a meeting place for three seemingly weakly compatible tasks - moral education (prevention of offenses), demonstration of the power of the state and public festivities. Tens of thousands of people flocked to install the new gibbet, and the sheriffs had to allocate a lot of people and money to maintain order in the crowd.
So, in 1770 in London, the corpses of two murderers, Conoway and Richardson, were hanged. “They set up tents with food and drink near the pillar, and people were having fun right under the corpses. Someone climbed onto the gibbet and removed the caps from the executed. One guy dared to shout at the top of his lungs - "Conoway, you and I often lit a pipe, so we'll do it again" - and climbed onto a pole with two lighted pipes, one of which he put in the killer's mouth, and the other he smoked himself, sitting on the gallows … Alas, the authorities did not make any efforts that day,”the capital newspaper wrote.
Hanged corpse of pirate William Kidd
Photo: World History Archive / Globallookpress.com
In 1806, Tom Otter was executed in Lincoln, who killed his wife the night after the wedding (whom he was forced to marry by the authorities, since he seduced her and the girl gave birth to a child). The festivities around Otter's cage continued for several weeks, beer and gin flowing like water.
All this angered the aristocrats, but contributed to the fact that the stories of terrible crimes remained in the people's memory for a long time. Many years later, pointing to a post with a cage, local residents recalled the capture and execution of the bandit. But, in addition to the moral lessons that could be drawn from his unhappy fate, people were attracted by the "terrible" story tickling their nerves. Let us remind that it was then, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, that the “glamorization” of crime in the press and literature began - and the public was carried away by “shocking and sensational” stories about unusual crimes.
The carnival did not last long, but pillars with a cage adorned English landscapes for many years - the law of 1752 did not specify the timing of their dismantling. Numerous mentions of birds that made their nests among the bones speak about the durability of the structures. Over time, some objects turned into boundary marks (like the gibbet of John Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham), while others became part of local place names. In England, dozens of roads, hills, forests, farms and pubs have been counted with the word gibbet in their names. Usually, the locals no longer remember what criminals these places owe their names to. But in some places they have preserved the memory of ancient murders and regularly put new pillars to replace the decayed ones.
Loop and Gibbet Pub (Sheffield)
Photo: adsg-demo.co.uk
End of public executions
The most faithful hanging in the cage was the London Admiralty Court (established to fight pirates). Almost until the middle of the 19th century, sea robbers and organizers of the riot on ships were punished in this way. But by that time, aversion to the gibbet's bloody spectacle, as well as the fear of rotting corpses dictated by new ideas of hygiene, overpowered in the public consciousness the satisfaction of the apparent triumph of justice. Thus, in 1824, a Londoner sent a letter to the Minister of the Interior, Robert Peel, demanding the immediate removal of the cages with bodies from the banks of the Thames that frightening ladies and foreigners alike: "this is a repulsive, disgusting, pitiful, dishonorable power of the law and a spectacle discrediting its performers."
Formally, it was forbidden to expose the corpses of those executed in chains and cages in 1834, but two years earlier the Anatomical Act was adopted, allowing the autopsy of the corpses of lonely poor people for medical purposes - and criminals ceased to be the only "resource" of medical workers. Finally, in the 19th century, the state philosophy of justice changed: discipline and re-education was considered more effective in fighting crime than intimidating executions.
Artem Kosmarsky
