The Legend of the Gibbet
Did live gibbeting ever take place in Britain? For the Victorians, the macabre question was a pressing one.
‘Even during the last century, hot irons would not have been welded onto a living man.’ This was the confident conclusion reached in 1898 by the novelist H. Rider Haggard after hours spent digging on Bradenham Heath in Norfolk searching for the gibbet cage in which the body of the murderer Stephen Watson, who had been hanged 100 years earlier. Haggard’s aim was to prove, once and for all, that Watson had been placed in the cage after his execution and not (as local legend insisted) while alive. As he explained in A Farmer’s Year, the macabre discovery of a fragment of skull in the cage showing clear signs of ‘searing’ from the hot irons of a blacksmith established that Watson had been dead before being gibbeted.
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