Read Online Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree by Alan Brooke, David Brandon - Free Book Online

1660 apprentices numbered some twenty thousand in London and domestic servants exceeded that number several times over. Both groups were vulnerable to being laid off during trade slumps and it was all too easy for them to turn to crime when times were bad. It is hardly surprising that sizeable numbers of apprentices and servants appeared on the scaffold at Tyburn.
    The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the production of cheap printed literature such as broadsides, newspapers, chapbooks, ballads and pamphlets and these constitute an important source for the study of early modern popular culture. Contemporary pamphlets gleefully described the gory details of executions and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which extolled the heroism and endurance of Protestant martyrs during Mary’s reign, was used as official propaganda during that of Elizabeth. Broadsides provided information on a single sheet with a woodcut illustration at the top and a popular narrative or sometimes a scurrilous attack on a figure in the public eye. Broadsides and ballads sold particularly well at Tyburn and although only a few survive from the seventeenth century, they offer insights into those who went to witness the executions.
    By the mid-seventeenth century, more people, particularly in London, had learned to read although not necessarily to write. Because London had a higher literacy rate than elsewhere, publishers were quick to take advantage of what became a lucrative market. Much of this ephemeral printed matter was cried round the streets by itinerant ballad-sellers of whom there may have been over three hundred in London in the 1640s. They had been regarded as vagabonds during Elizabeth’s reign and were always of low social status. However, crowds of the size that gathered to witness many of the executions at Tyburn always provided a ready market for their wares. Although this street-literature was diverse in the topics it covered – romance, chivalry, bawdiness, heroism, the supernatural – crime was one of the most popular themes and especially when it involved murders or bizarre or salacious activities. Ballads focused with prurient relish on murders involving the aristocracy, on wives who murdered their husbands, on serial murderers, on murders where witchcraft or necrophilia was thought to be involved or on any unusual sexual practices. This street literature was generally loyal to the Crown and condemnatory of rebellions or conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Plot. It therefore played a role not unlike that of today’s tabloid newspapers. Ballads flourished during the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries but went into decline with the appearance of new kinds of prose writings which could be said to be the forerunners of the literary genre of the novel.
    Another practice which developed in early modern England was the elaborate playing out of rituals of various kinds on or around the execution site. One of these was the last dying speech, a sixteenth-century innovation intended by the secular authorities, supported by the Church, to uphold their power through ideological means. It developed at a time when various statutes were broadening the range of offences for which the death penalty could be imposed (Sharpe, 1990: 31). Treason, homicide, coining, rape, horse-stealing, cutpursing and the theft of items valued at more than 40 s now became capital offences. Dying speeches were intended to provide a very public articulation of the fact that crime did not pay and that those who heard them should realise how important it was to respect secular and religious authority. However, not all felons used their valedictory speeches in this way; sometimes they delivered speeches which mocked and debunked the authorities, thereby converting the activities around the scaffold into a parody, a popular, carnivalesque celebration which undermined the powers that be (Laqueur: 1989).
    Public execution at Tyburn and elsewhere and the rituals