By this time, as we have seen, it had gradually become usual for the
court, in atrocious cases, to direct that the murderer’s body should
be hung upon a gibbet in chains, near the place where the fact was
committed; but this was no part of the legal judgment.[55] By an Act of
25 George II. (1752) gibbeting in chains was first legally recognized.
By this statute it was enacted that the body should, after sentence
delivered and execution done, be given to the surgeons to be dissected
and anatomized, and that the judge may direct the body to be afterwards
hung in chains, but in no wise to be buried without dissection.[56]
But still the gibbeting did not form, as it never has formed, part of
the legal sentence.[57] The judge could direct it to be carried out by
a special order to the sheriff,[58] and this was sometimes done--as we
have seen in the case of Mr. Penny’s murder in 1741--on the petition
of the relatives of the deceased. The theory was that the body was at
the disposal of the Crown, and that an order to hang in chains would be
granted on application to the proper authorities. This _post-mortem_
revengement was thought to be a singular great comfort to the relatives
of the murdered man. The Roman law also permitted the murderer’s body
to remain on the gibbet after execution, as a comfortable sight to
the relatives of the deceased:--“Famosos latrones, in his locis, ubi
graffati sunt, furca figendos placuit: ut et conspictu deterreantur
alii, et solatio sit cognatis interemptorum.”[59]
The Act of 1752 seems to have cleared the way considerably, and from
this date gibbetings rapidly increased. It may here be recalled that
the idea of being gibbeted was ever a very terrifying one to the
sufferer, and many a strong man who had stood fearless under the dread
sentence broke down when he was measured for his irons. We may inquire
a little what was in prospect for the caitiff that made the iron so to
enter into his soul.
At Newgate, which no doubt gave the example to other prisons, it was
the custom, after execution, to convey the body into a place grimly
called “the Kitchen.” Here stood a caldron of boiling pitch, and into
this the carcass was thrown. It was shortly after withdrawn, placed in
the chains, and these cold-rivetted--truly enough “fast bound in misery
and iron.” We can picture the brutal work, with, no doubt, the coarse
jesting, when the dead malefactor was finally rivetted up in what was
called “his last suit.”
“’Twas strange, ’twas passing strange;
’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful.”[60]
Occasionally the bodies were put into sacks, and so hung up. In France
also, men in the fifteenth century were drowned in sacks of leather;
hence the term “gens de sac et de corde” for evilly-disposed persons at
the present day.
It is well known--for there is frequent allusion to it in the
literature of the time--that travellers approaching London and other
large cities, in the last century, were offended, both in sight and
in other ways, by the number of dingy, dead, iron-bound bodies that
welcomed them. In remote parts a gibbet had the effect of diverting the
slender traffic--at least when night set in. Belated wayfarers were
grieved by the horrid grating sound as the body in the iron frame swung
creaking to and fro. Thus Shakespeare:--
“Against the senseless winds shall grin in vain,
Who in contempt shall hiss at thee again.”[61]
And in the daytime these odd features in an English landscape often
proved an attraction to flippant sporting men.
On the banks of the Thames, opposite Blackwall, hung the bodies of
numerous pirates. The Rev. T. Mozeley, in his “Reminiscences,” tells
us that “the only inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs that I ever saw
were three murderers hanging from a gibbet.” A correspondent tells us
“they looked like scarecrows.” One of Hogarth’s pictures of “The Idle
Apprentice” series shows the pirates hanging in the distance.[62] In
later times, in the windows of the waterside taverns at Blackwall,
“spy-glasses,” or what Robinson Crusoe called “perspective glasses,”
were fixed for people to enjoy the spectacle; similarly the Greenwich
pensioners on the Hill used to exhibit the gibbeted pirates on the
opposite side of the river, in the Isle of Dogs, through telescopes;
and when the bodies were removed by legislative enactment, some of the
forward newspapers of the day made an outcry that the holiday-makers
were deprived of their amusements.[63]
[Illustration: A THAMES PIRATE.]
In the same manner, at Northampton, on the occasion of the last public
execution there, in 1852, thousands of people gathered together, and
were painfully disappointed and turbulent when they found the day had
been changed. Some of these worthies said if they could only get at
the under-sheriff “they would let him know what it was to keep honest
folk in suspense,” one old woman loudly declaring that she should
claim her expenses from the authorities.[64] The New Drop set up at
the Northampton County Gaol in 1818 was of such ample capacity that it
was proudly described by the governor as efficient for the hanging of
twelve persons “comfortably.”[65]