Procession to a Hanging

"They take them five and twenty at a time, every month, besides sudden and extraordinary executions in the course of the week, on a large cart like a high scaffold. They go along quite jollily, holding their sprigs of rosemary and singing songs, accompanied by their friends and a multitude of people. On reaching the gallows one of the party acts as spokesman, saying fifty words or so. Then the music, which they had learned at their leisure in the prisons, being repeated, the executioner hastens the business, and beginning at one end, fastens each man's halter to the gibbet. They are so closely packed that they touch each other, with their hands tied in front of them, wrist to wrist, as as to leave them the option of taking off their hats and saluting the bystanders. One careless fellow availed himself of this facility to shade his face from the sun. Finally, the executioner, having come down from the scaffold, has the whip applied to the cart horses, and thus the culprits remain dangling in the air precisely like a bunch of fat thrushes. They are hard to die of themselves and unless their own relations or friends pulled their feet or pelted them with brickbats in the breast as they do, it would fare badly with them. The proceeding is really barbarous and strikes those who witness it with horror. Here one never hears the noise of broils and consequently no murders are committed, from fear of the law. Rather from despair or difficulties than on any other account, the people occasionally hang and drown themselves."(1)

So a chaplain to the Venetian ambassador described London hangings in 1618.  Executions were highly public events, meant to impress onlookers with the justice and terror of the law, at least as much as to rid society of criminals.  The most common site of executions was Tyburn, some distance west of the City near Hyde Park, so that the condemned had to be transported through the City to the gallows.  In the early seventeenth century the parish church of St Sepulchre would toll its bell at midnight on the eve of executions.  A man paid by the parish would then visit the prison with a handbell, pausing at the gate to intone in a solemn voice: "O ye prisoners within condemned this day to die, remember your sins, call to God for grace whilst yet you have time."  The bell would toll again the following morning as the condemned rode past on their way to execution, and once more for a quarter of an hour at 10:00, to signify that the felons had been dispatched. At Tyburn crowds assembled to watch the execution, dense enough to require the erection of a viewing stand in the early eighteenth century.  Vendors would hawk food to spectators and sometimes a ballad would be published commemorating the career of a famous criminal on the day of his execution.

(1)From: 'Venice: February 1618, 1-14', Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 15: 1617-1619 (1909), pp. 126-144. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=88671  Date accessed: 19 February 2009.

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