The Legend of the Gibbet

‘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.

The popular story that a man had been suspended in a cage on Bradenham Heath to die by starvation and exposure was just one among numerous accounts of ‘hanging alive in chains’ or ‘live gibbeting’ that thrilled the British public in the late 19th and early 20th century. Such stories dated the practice to anywhere from the early 1600s to the lifetimes of their own grandparents. In 1873, a reader from Cumbria wrote to the periodical Notes and Queries to share a story that, in 1777, the cries of a highwayman suspended in a gibbet cage near Carlisle had been so heart-rending that a passing coach driver had shot him to put him out of his misery. An anonymous letter submitted to the Illustrated Police News in 1884 claimed that the author’s grandfather, in his youth, had often ‘used to walk to work with some miners over a lonely moor in Cornwall’ where there was ‘a cage of iron bars in which a living man was imprisoned’. And in 1905 Highways and Byways in Derbyshire claimed that the cries of a gibbeted criminal had so disturbed the lord of Chatsworth in 1815 that he had personally put an end to the practice in the county.

Had such a barbaric punishment ever really been carried out on British soil? The question was fiercely debated in Notes and Queries from 1872 until 1935. It began on 26 October 1872, with E.M.S. Chichester’s account that, near Merrington Church in Durham, ‘there long hung the bones of the last man ever gibbeted alive in England’, occurring in 1805.

Chichester’s letter prompted similar stories from locations ranging from Scotland to Hampshire. Other contributors wrote to quash these stories, often citing legal histories and documents to make their case. Some readers seem to have spent considerable time wading through hefty tomes such as William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) or the 24 volumes of Danby Pickering’s Statutes at Large (1761-1806) to report that no indication of live gibbeting was to be found within. As late as 1935 Henry Bateson reported: ‘I have searched many legal works and official records without finding any sentence of, or execution by, gibbeting alive.’ In total, 42 readers contributed to the debate. While most contributed a short paragraph arguing one way or the other, in 1909 Alfred Marks took nine columns to vociferously defend such tales by quoting ‘trustworthy and most valuable’ accounts.

There seem to have been several foundations for the Victorian belief that men (the victims were always male) had been hung in cages and left to die as a legal punishment in Britain. First was the haunting existence of gibbet posts across the countryside. Post-mortem gibbeting – the display of a criminal body in a specially designed metal cage suspended from a pole or scaffold – was used in Britain from 1751 when the Murder Act was passed, stipulating that ‘some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment’ to distinguish ‘the horrid crime of murder’ from the many other hanging offences. The cages were costly to produce, so in practice only two bodies a year on average were gibbeted between 1752 and 1834, when the practice ended with the passing of the Act to Abolish the Practice of Hanging the Bodies of Criminals in Chains. It seems probable, however, that potent memories of gibbeted bodies fed late Victorian legends about live gibbeting.

The belief was also based on the existence of a handful of 16th- and early-17th-century references in chronicle histories to live gibbeting being practised in Britain during the reign of Henry VIII. In his 1577 Description of England, for instance, William Harrison claimed that the punishment had been used earlier in his own lifetime for premeditated murder, while Henry Chettle’s 1603 England’s Mourning Garment claimed that Elizabeth I had abolished ‘hanging wilful murderers alive in chains’. Both claims were almost certainly written to glorify Elizabeth, but they were cited confidently by amateur historians such as G.H. Burton, writing in the Stamford Mercury in 1898, as evidence that Britain had witnessed ‘revolting scenes’ of punishment in recent history. The Victorian dogma that their own period was one of advancing civilisation was perhaps the most important underlying reason why the belief in live gibbeting was championed.

The fascination with hanging in chains formed part of a more widespread interest with historical crime and punishment that saw the press filled with articles about burning, boiling, and pressing to death. In the 1870s there was a flurry of appeals in Notes and Queries for information about the ‘Jungfrau’ or ‘Iron Maiden’ (wrongly believed to have been a genuine medieval torture instrument), and enquiries about where one might be seen. In the 1880s contributors shared information about the whereabouts of surviving scold’s bridles (described by one writer as ‘awe-inspiring’ machines), and in the 1890s, in response to an appeal for a comprehensive list of the ‘obsolete instruments of torture’ still surviving in Britain, correspondents sent in details of finger stocks in Leicestershire, ducking stools in Scarborough, and so forth. This rather gruesome appetite seems to have been a response to the passing of the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act on 29 May 1868, which ended public hanging and so removed the last vestige of punishment as spectacle in Britain. The debate about live gibbeting began four years later.

It was never properly resolved. When B. Nicholson complained that the issue had not been ‘definitively answered’ in Notes and Queries in 1873, few would have guessed that more than 60 years later readers would still be asking whether it was ‘ever practised in England?’ Or, indeed, that it some still believe it today.

Joanne Parker is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter.