The Technology of the Gibbet

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Sep 2014

The practice of “hanging in chains” or gibbeting had been part of the punitive repertoire of the English and Welsh judicial system for centuries before the 1751–52 Murder Act specified it as one of two mandatory post-mortem punishments for murderers. The practice was not abolished until 1834. This article considers the technical and design features of the gibbet cage, through an exhaustive survey and catalogue of their surviving remains. It notes that, given the comparative rarity of hanging in chains, no chronological or regional traditions of design are evident in this kind of artifact, since blacksmiths were individually solving the problem of fulfilling the necessary functions of a gibbet cage without knowledge of previous examples and under great time pressure. The technology of the gibbet shows how state directives intersected with geographical discretion in the creation of idiosyncratic local solutions.

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The Technology of the Gibbet

Sarah Tarlow 0 ) School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester , Leicester, UK The practice of hanging in chains or gibbeting had been part of the punitive repertoire of the English and Welsh judicial system for centuries before the 1751-52 Murder Act specified it as one of two mandatory post-mortem punishments for murderers. The practice was not abolished until 1834. This article considers the technical and design features of the gibbet cage, through an exhaustive survey and catalogue of their surviving remains. It notes that, given the comparative rarity of hanging in chains, no chronological or regional traditions of design are evident in this kind of artifact, since blacksmiths were individually solving the problem of fulfilling the necessary functions of a gibbet cage without knowledge of previous examples and under great time pressure. The technology of the gibbet shows how state directives intersected with geographical discretion in the creation of idiosyncratic local solutions. - In 1751, there were so many crimes carrying the death sentence that people began to worry that there was no way of distinguishing the most serious among them. To that end, a parliamentary act for better preventing the horrid crime of murder ordered that those convicted of murder should suffer some additional punishment. From the following year, when the Act became law, the bodies of those executed for murder could not be buried unless they had first been either given to anatomists for dissection, or hung in chains. Hanging in chains, also called gibbeting, involved placing the dead body inside a gibbet cage (an iron cage or framework) and suspending it from a high post. A new interdisciplinary project based at the University of Leicester and funded by the Wellcome Trust aims to examine how the body of the executed criminal was treated judicially, medically, scientifically, socially, and religiously during the key period between the Murder Act and the Anatomy Act of 1832. This latter piece of legislation aimed to regularize the supply of cadavers to anatomy schools in the wake of the Burke and Hare scandal and increasing anxiety about grave robbing (Richardson 1987). After 1832, executed criminals were generally buried within the prison precinct, and the needs of anatomists were supplied by the unclaimed bodies of the poor who died in workhouses or hospitals. After the summer of 1832 nobody was gibbeted in Britain, and the practice was formally abolished for England and Wales in 1834. This paper considers the gibbet as an artifact, and in particular addresses some of the peculiarities of design evident in the corpus of surviving gibbet cages in England and Wales. Gibbets have never been described or catalogued before, and the literature on hanging in chains is predominantly non-academic. One of the projects first tasks therefore was to undertake extensive research among primary historical sources and in the collections of local museums around the country. Project members Richard Ward and Zoe Dyndor constructed a database of capital convictions in England and Wales during the years between 1751 and 1832 with post mortem provision, based on historical sources such as the court sessions papers of the assize courts, sheriffs cravings (applications for reimbursement of expenses incurred by the sheriffs in managing the assizes and carrying out sentences) and newspaper records. According to these sources, the majority of murderers bodies (over 80 %) were sentenced to the anatomists slab. However, this paper concerns the 9.6 % who were hung in chains (around 6.5 % of convicted murderers were pardoned, a few were burned at the stake and around 2 % died in jail before their execution). Murderers made up about three quarters of those who were hung in chains, but the punishment was also ordered for other serious crimes, most frequently robbing the mail, piracy and smuggling. This article is particularly concerned with the technology of the gibbet and what that can tell us about craft traditions, design, and innovation; and about the interaction of state-level directive with local discretion. It makes use of a survey of all surviving gibbet cages in England and Wales, together with historical sources, notably newspapers; local histories, mostly nineteenthcentury in date; and a number of documentary sources including most notably, the Sheriffs Cravings. Richard Ward of our research team has discovered a previously under-exploited source of evidence at the National Archives in Kew in the form of the expense claims submitted by sheriffs in relation to the costs of keeping remanded prisoners and executing sentences passed at the assize courts: the Sheriffs Cravings (TNA records beginning T90, Ward 2014). The Incidence of Hanging in Chains Hanging in chains had long been part of the repertoire of discretionary punishments a judge might choose to pronounce. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was quite wide (...truncated)


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Sarah Tarlow. The Technology of the Gibbet, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2014, pp. 668-699, Volume 18, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s10761-014-0275-0