Tyburn's Martyrs Execution in England, 1675-1775

The public execution at Tyburn is one of the most evocative and familiar of all eighteenth-century images. Whether it elicits horror or prurient fascination  – or both –  the Tyburn hanging day has become synonymous with the brutality of a bygone age and a legal system which valued property over human life. But, as this fascinating cultural and social history of the gallows reveals, the early modern execution was far more than just a debased spectator sport. The period between the Restoration and the American Revolution witnessed the rise and fall of a vast body of execution literature – last dying speeches and confessions, criminal trials and biographies – featuring the criminal as an Everyman (or Everywoman) holding up a mirror to the sins of his readers. The popularity of such publications reflected the widespread, and persistent, belief in the gallows as a literal preview of ‘God’s Tribunal’: a sacred space in which solemn oaths, supernatural signs and, above all, courage, could trump the rulings of the secular courts. Here the condemned traitor, “game” highwayman, or model penitent could proclaim not only his or her innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and social justice by invoking the disparity between man’s justice and God’s. 

Acknowledgements and Notes on Sources

Abbreviations

Preface

1. From Newgate to Tyburn: Setting the Stage

Introduction; Discretion and the 'Bloody Code';

The Tyburn Procession and Execution Ritual; Tyburn Fair: Mythology and Histioriography
2. From the Gallows to Grub Street: Last Dying Speeches and Criminal 'Lives'
Introduction;Origins of Printed Last Dying Speeches;Literacy in Early Modern England;The Market for Criminal 'Lives' and Confessions
3. Everyman and the Gallows: Contemporary Explanations for Criminality
Introduction;The Slippery Slope;Nature vs.Nuture;Excuses: Mental Incapacity, Necessity, Gender and Youth; The Decline of the Criminal as 'Everyman'
4. Highwaymen Lives: Social Critique and the Criminal
Introduction; The Robber as a Vehicle for Social Satire;Criminal Celebrities;The Decline of the Haighwayman as a Social Critic
5. The Ordniary's Account: Confession and the Criminal
Introduction;The Ordinary: Question-monger or Plain Dealer?;The Value of a Free and Full Confession;The Decline of the 'Account'
6. Dying Well: Martyrs and Penitents
Introduction;Dying in Charity with all the World;Religion in Newgate: Popular Religious Beliefs and Religious Toleration and Diversity;Methodism and the Decline of the Ordinary's Account
7. Dying Game: Highwaymen and Bridegrooms
Introduction;Dying like a Man;False Courage and Christian Courage;Weddings and Hangings
8. God's Tribunal: Providential Discoveries and Ordeals
Introduction;God's Justice and Man's Justice;Calling God to Witness: Sacred Oaths and Signs;The Meaning of Suffering
Conclusion: The Adjournment of God's Tribunal

 

Andrea McKenzie is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Victoria, Canada. She has published numerous articles on crime and print culture in se

venteenth- and eighteenth century England, and is currently working on a cultural history of English courage from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

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