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Authors: Alan Brooke, David Brandon
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surrounding it were intended by the authorities to emphasise the omnipotence of the law and the condign, inevitable punishments that would befall those who seriously transgressed it. In reality, what often happened was a burlesque, both on the way to and at the place of execution and the development in popular culture of a widespread belittling of and irreverence for the authorities. Evidence of this can be found in the many slang terms that emerged to describe both the hanging day and the hanging itself. These include: ‘the hanging match’; ‘collar day’; a ‘hanging fair’ or the ‘Paddington Fair’; to ‘dance the Paddington frisk’; ‘jammed’; ‘collared’; ‘nubbed’; ‘stretched’; ‘tucked up’ or ‘turned off’. The noose was a ‘horse’s nightcap’ or a ‘Tyburn tippet’. Other slang references included: ‘a man will piss when he cannot whistle’ and ‘there is nothing in being hang’d, but a wry neck and a wet pair of breeches’ (Sharpe 1985a: 16).
That this attempt to browbeat the people into respect for law and authority was unsuccessful is indicated by the fact that the crowds that surrounded the scaffold often contained people who would later feature centre-stage at subsequent Tyburn Fairs. An early example of the fact that the prospect of barbaric punishment did not necessarily dissuade people from committing serious crimes was one Edmund Kirk who had stood in the crowd at Tyburn watching the execution of a man for murdering his wife. Two days later, Kirk murdered his own wife.
The awful punishment of hanging and quartering which involved disembowelling was confined to men. Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), the eminent jurist, offers a not very convincing reason why women were not subjected to the same public pain and humiliation: ‘For as decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive.’ However, this explanation is difficult to sustain given the practice of ‘carting’ around London. This involved male and female criminals being led at a cart’s tail around the streets and made the object of the onlookers’ ridicule and abuse. In certain cases women who underwent this punishment were ordered to walk naked. For example in 1579, three women – Joan Sharpe, Edith Bannister and Clemence Belton – who had all abandoned their infants, were stripped naked, tied to a cart and whipped with rods around the City and into Southwark (Griffiths and Jenner, 2000: 141). The offence of a wife who murdered her husband had been defined as petty treason since 1351 but in the sixteenth century a more serious view tended to be taken of this crime which was now seen as undermining the social order, an order dominated by men. Women found guilty of this offence were fastened to a stake and had a rope tied around the neck whereupon they were strangled before the surrounding material was ignited.
Peter Ackroyd argues that women in sixteenth-century London played a subordinate role to men in a markedly hierarchical and patriarchal society. In a ‘city of power and business, they retain a supportive invisible presence’ (Ackroyd 2000: 628). Be that as it may, their largely invisible presence was often made visible on the scaffold at Tyburn, as with a formidable beldame and cutpurse who was executed in 1557, but not before she had greatly entertained the crowds by directing at the legal authorities one of the most sustained outbursts of obscene invective ever heard at Tyburn. Women certainly appeared before the courts less than men at this time. The legal system of early modern England very much reflected this male-dominated society and they were not permitted, for example, to serve as jurors or, of course, as magistrates. In fact their involve-ment, except sometimes as suspects, was largely limited to the examination of other women for evidence of pregnancy or marks which would
That this attempt to browbeat the people into respect for law and authority was unsuccessful is indicated by the fact that the crowds that surrounded the scaffold often contained people who would later feature centre-stage at subsequent Tyburn Fairs. An early example of the fact that the prospect of barbaric punishment did not necessarily dissuade people from committing serious crimes was one Edmund Kirk who had stood in the crowd at Tyburn watching the execution of a man for murdering his wife. Two days later, Kirk murdered his own wife.
The awful punishment of hanging and quartering which involved disembowelling was confined to men. Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), the eminent jurist, offers a not very convincing reason why women were not subjected to the same public pain and humiliation: ‘For as decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive.’ However, this explanation is difficult to sustain given the practice of ‘carting’ around London. This involved male and female criminals being led at a cart’s tail around the streets and made the object of the onlookers’ ridicule and abuse. In certain cases women who underwent this punishment were ordered to walk naked. For example in 1579, three women – Joan Sharpe, Edith Bannister and Clemence Belton – who had all abandoned their infants, were stripped naked, tied to a cart and whipped with rods around the City and into Southwark (Griffiths and Jenner, 2000: 141). The offence of a wife who murdered her husband had been defined as petty treason since 1351 but in the sixteenth century a more serious view tended to be taken of this crime which was now seen as undermining the social order, an order dominated by men. Women found guilty of this offence were fastened to a stake and had a rope tied around the neck whereupon they were strangled before the surrounding material was ignited.
Peter Ackroyd argues that women in sixteenth-century London played a subordinate role to men in a markedly hierarchical and patriarchal society. In a ‘city of power and business, they retain a supportive invisible presence’ (Ackroyd 2000: 628). Be that as it may, their largely invisible presence was often made visible on the scaffold at Tyburn, as with a formidable beldame and cutpurse who was executed in 1557, but not before she had greatly entertained the crowds by directing at the legal authorities one of the most sustained outbursts of obscene invective ever heard at Tyburn. Women certainly appeared before the courts less than men at this time. The legal system of early modern England very much reflected this male-dominated society and they were not permitted, for example, to serve as jurors or, of course, as magistrates. In fact their involve-ment, except sometimes as suspects, was largely limited to the examination of other women for evidence of pregnancy or marks which would
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