The universal instinct of self-preservation underlies the whole theory of legal punishments. Society, from the earliest beginnings, has claimed through its rulers to inflict penalties upon those who have broken the laws framed for the protection of all. These penalties have varied greatly in all ages and in all times. They have been based on different principles. Many, especially in ruder and earlier times, have been conceived in a vindictive spirit; others, notably those of Mosaic law, were retaliatory, or aimed at restitution. All, more or less, were intended to deter from crime. The criminal had generally to pay in his person or his goods. He was either subjected to physical pain applied in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived of liberty, or adjudged as a slave to indemnify by manual labour those whom he had wronged. Imprisonment as practised in modern times has followed from the last-named class of punishments. Although affecting the individual, and in many of its phases with brutal and reckless disregard for human suffering, it can hardly be styled a purely personal punishment, as will be shown from a closer examination of the various methods of corporeal punishment.

In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the poorer sort was the wild revelry of the aristocratic prisoners of the press-yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest officials to suffer them to escape.

Taking first the punishments which fell short of death, those most common in England, until comparatively recent times, were branding, mutilation, dismemberment, whipping, and degrading public exposure. Branding was often carried out with circumstances of atrocious barbarity. Vagabonds were marked with the letter V, idlers and masterless men with the letter S, betokening a condemnation to slavery; any church brawler lost his ears, and for a second offence might be branded with the letter F, as a "fraymaker" and fighter. Sometimes the penalty was to bore a hole of the compass of an inch through the gristle of the right ear. Branding was the commutation of a capital sentence on clerk convicts, or persons allowed benefit of clergy, and it was inflicted upon the brawn of the left thumb, the letter M being used in murder cases, the letter T in others. In the reign of William and Mary, when the privilege of benefit of clergy was found to be greatly abused, an act was passed, by which the culprit was branded or "burnt in the most visible part of the left cheek nearest the nose."

Mutilation was an ancient Saxon punishment, no doubt perpetuating the Mosaic law of retaliation which claimed an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb. William the Conqueror adopted it in his penal code. It was long put in force against those who broke the forestry laws, coiners, thieves, and such as failed to prove their innocence by ordeal. Although almost abandoned by the end of the sixteenth century, the penalty of mutilation, extending to the loss of the right hand, still continued to be punishment for murder and bloodshed within the limits of a royal residence. The most elaborate ceremonial was observed. All the hierarchy of court officials attended; there was the sergeant of the wood-yard, the master cook to hand the dressing-knife, the sergeant of the poultry, the yeoman of the scullery with a fire of coals, the sergeant farrier, who heated and delivered the searing irons, which were applied by the chief surgeon after the dismemberment had been effected. Vinegar, basin, and cloths were handed to the operator by the groom of the salcery, the sergeant of the ewry, and the yeoman of the chandrey. "After the hand had been struck off and the stump seared, the sergeant of the pantry offered bread, and the sergeant of the cellar a pot of red wine, of which the sufferer was to partake with what appetite he might." Readers of Sir Walter Scott will remember how Nigel Olifaunt, in the "Fortunes of Nigel," was threatened with the loss of his hand for having committed a breach of privilege in the palace of Greenwich and its precincts. Pistols are found on his person when he accidentally meets and accosts James I. For the offence he may be prosecuted, so Sir Mungo Malagrowther complacently informs him, usque ad mutilationem, "even to dismemberation."

The occasion serves the garrulous knight to refer to a recent performance, "a pretty pageant when Stubbs, the Puritan, was sentenced to mutilation for writing and publishing a seditious pamphlet against Elizabeth. With Stubbs, Page, the publisher, also suffered. They lost their right hands," the wrist being divided by a cleaver driven through the joint by the force of a mallet.

"I remember," says the historian Camden, "being then present, that Stubbs, when his right hand was cut off, plucked off his hat with his left, and said with a loud voice, 'God save the queen.' The multitude standing about was deeply silent, either out of horror of this new and unwonted kind of punishment, or out of commiseration towards the man...." The process of mutilation was at times left to the agonized action of the culprit: as in the brutal case of one Penedo, who in 1570, for counterfeiting the seal of the Court of Queen's Bench, was twice put in the pillory on market-day in Cheapside. The first day one of his ears was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he should be compelled "by his own proper motion" to tear it away; and on the second day he was to lose his other ear in the same cruel fashion. William Prynne, it will be remembered, also lost his ears on the pillory, but at the hands of the executioner. The Earl of Dorset, in giving the sentence of the Star Chamber Court, asked his fellow judges "whether he should burn him in the forehead, or slit him in the nose?... I should be loth he should escape with his ears; ... therefore I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropt too." Having suffered all this on the pillory, he was again punished three years later, when he lost the remainder of his ears, and was branded with the letters S. L. (seditious libeller) on each cheek. Doctor Bastwick and others were similarly treated. Doctor Bastwick's daughter, Mrs. Poe, after his ears were cut off, called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her. Prynne was a voluminous writer, and is said to have produced some two hundred volumes in all. A contemporary, who saw him in the pillory at Cheapside, says that they burned his huge volumes under his nose, which almost suffocated him.

Although mutilations and floggings were frequently carried out at the pillory, that well-known machine was primarily intended as a means of painful and degrading exposure, and not for the infliction of physical torture. The pillory is said to have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, and it probably dates from times much more remote. The et??? of the Greeks, the pillar on which offenders were publicly exhibited, seems to have been akin to the pillory, just as the ??f??, or wooden collar, was the prototype of the French _carcan_ or iron circlet which was riveted around the culprit's neck, and attached by a chain to the post or pillory. In England the pillory or "stretch neck" was at first applied only to fraudulent traders, perjurers, forgers, and so forth; but as years passed it came to be more exclusively the punishment of those guilty of infamous crimes, amongst whom were long included rash writers who dared to express their opinions too freely before the days of freedom of the press. Besides Prynne, Leighton, Burton, Warton, and Bastwick, intrepid John Lilburne also suffered, under the Star Chamber decree, which prohibited the printing of any book without a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or the authorities of the two universities. Daniel Defoe, again, was pilloried in 1703 for his pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." Defoe gave himself up, and was pilloried first in Cheapside, and afterwards in the Temple. The mob so completely sympathized with him, that they covered him with flowers, drank his health, and sang his "Ode to the Pillory" in chorus. Doctor Shebbeare was pilloried in 1759, for his "Letters to the People of England." But he found a friend in the under-sheriff, Mr. Beardmore, who took him to the place of penitence, in a stage-coach, and allowed a footman in rich livery to hold an umbrella over the doctor's head, as he stood in the pillory. Beardmore was afterwards arraigned for neglect of duty, found guilty, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment.

In 1765, Williams, the publisher, who reprinted Wilkes's North Briton, stood in the pillory in Palace Yard for an hour. For the moment he became popular. He arrived in a hackney-coach numbered 45,[162:1] attended by a vast crowd. He was cheered vociferously as he mounted the pillory with a sprig of laurel in each hand; and a gentleman present made a collection of two hundred guineas for him in a purple purse adorned with orange ribbons. In front of the pillory the mob erected a gallows, and hung on it a boot, with other emblems, intended to gibbet the unpopular minister Lord Bute. Williams was conducted from the pillory amid renewed acclamations, and the excitement lasted for some days. Lampoons and caricatures were widely circulated. Several street ballads were also composed, one of which began:

Lord Dundonald in 1814 was actually sentenced to the pillory, but the Government shrank from inflicting the punishment upon that much wronged naval hero. The pillory ceased to be a punishment, except for perjury, in 1815, but was not finally abolished until 1837, and as late as 1830 one Doctor Bossy suffered on it for perjury.

The earliest form of pillory was simply a post erected in a cross-road by the lord of the manor, as a mark of his seigneury.[164:1] It bore his arms, and on it was a collar, the carcan already mentioned, by which culprits were secured. This was in course of time developed, and the pillory became a cross-piece of wood fixed like a sign-board at the top of a pole, and placed upon an elevated platform. In this cross were three holes, one for the head, the other two for the wrists. The cross-piece was in two halves, the upper turning on a hinge to admit the culprit's head and hands, and closed with a padlock when the operation of insertion was completed. A more elaborate affair, capable of accommodating a number of persons, is figured in mediÆval woodcuts, but this sort of pillory does not appear to have been very generally used. The curious observer may still see specimens in England of this well-known instrument of penal discipline: one is preserved in the parish church of Rye, Sussex, another is in the museum at Brighton.

The stocks served like the pillory to hold up offenders to public infamy. The first authentic mention of them is in a statute of Edward III, by which they were to be applied to unruly labourers. Soon after this they were established by law in every village, often near the parish church. They were the punishment for brawling, drunkenness, vagrancy, and all disorderly conduct. Wood-stealers or "hedge-tearers" were set in the stocks, about the year 1584, for a couple of days with the stolen wood in front of them.

The story goes that Cardinal Wolsey, when a young parish priest, was put in the stocks at Lymington by Sir Amyas Poulett, for having "exceeded" at a village feast. The old "Chap" books contain numerous references to the stocks of course. Welch Taffy, "the unfortunate traveller," was put into the stocks for calling a justice of the peace a "boobie;" and "Simple Simon," when he interfered in a butter-woman's quarrel, was adjudged to be drunk and put into the stocks between the two viragoes, who scolded him all the time. The story of Lord Camden is probably well known. When a young barrister he had a desire to try the stocks, and was left in them by an absent-minded friend, for the greater part of the day. The last stocks in London were those of St. Clement's Dane's in Portugal Street, which were removed in 1826, to make way for local improvements. As late as 1860 one John Gambles of Stanningly was sentenced to sit in the stocks for six hours for Sunday gambling, and actually endured his punishment.[165:1] Stocks were last to be seen at Heath near Wakefield, Painswick in Gloucestershire, and other places. In all cases the physical discomfort of the stocks, no less than that of the pillory, was generally aggravated by the rude horse-play of a jeering and actively offensive mob. A reference to the inconvenient attentions of the bystanders at such an exhibition will be found in an old "Chap" book, entitled "The True Trial of the Understanding," in which among other riddles the following is given:

The answer is, a man pelted in the pillory.

Worse sometimes happened, and in several cases death ensued from ill-usage in the pillory. Thus when John Waller, alias Trevor, was pilloried in 1732, in Seven Dials, for falsely accusing innocent men, so as to obtain the reward given on the conviction of highwaymen, so great was the indignation of the populace that they pelted him to death. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder, but against persons unknown. In 1763 a man who stood in the pillory at Bow, for an unnatural crime, was killed by the mob. Ann Marrow, who had been guilty of the strange offence of disguising herself as a man, and as such marrying three different women, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment, and exposure on the pillory, at Charing Cross. So great was the resentment of the populace, principally those of the female sex, that they pelted her till they put out both her eyes.[167:1]

No account of the minor physical punishments formerly inflicted would be complete without reference to the methods of coercing ill-conditioned females. These were mostly of the same character as the pillory and stocks. Chief among them was the ducking or cucking-stool, a scourge for scolds, and once as common in every parish as the stocks. Other varieties of it were known under the names of tumbrel, the gumstole, the triback, the trebucket, and the reive. It may be described briefly as consisting of a chair or seat fixed at the end of a long plank, which revolved on a pivot, and by some simple application of leverage upset the occupant of the chair into a pond or stream. Mr. Cole, 1782, describes one which was hung to a beam in the middle of a bridge. The Leominster stool, which is still preserved, is a plank upon a low substantial framework, having the seat at one end, and working like an ordinary seesaw: that at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrel order, and was a framework on a pair of wheels, with shafts at one end, the stool being at the other. In this, as in the Leicester "scolding cart," and other forms of tumbrels, the culprit was paraded through the town before immersion. The punishment was primarily intended for scolds, shrews, and "curst queens," but it was also applied to female brewers and bakers who brewed bad ale, and sold bad bread. It was inflicted pursuant to sentence in open court, but in some parts the bailiffs had the power within their own jurisdictions, and the right of gallows, tumbrel, and pillory was often claimed by lords of the manor. The greatest antiquity is claimed for this sort of punishment. Bowine declares that it was used by the Saxons, by whom it was called "Cathedra in qua rixosÆ mulieres sedentes aquÆ demergebantur." No doubt the ducking was often roughly and cruelly carried out. We have in the frontispiece of an old "Chap" book, which relates how "an old woman was drowned in Ratcliffe highway," a pictorial representation of the ceremony of ducking, and it is stated that she met her death by being dipped too often or too long. That the instrument was in general use through the kingdom is proved by numerous entries in ancient records. Thus Lysons, in his "Environs of London," states that at a court of the Manor of Edgware in 1552 the inhabitants were presented for not having a tumbrel and a ducking-stool as laid down by law. In the Leominster town records the bailiff and chamberlains are repeatedly brought up and fined either for not providing "gumstoles" or not properly repairing them, while in the same and other records are numerous statements of bills paid to carpenters for making or mending these instruments. The use of them, moreover, was continued to very recent times. A woman was ducked under Kingston Bridge in 1745 for scolding. At Manchester, Liverpool, and other Lancashire towns the stool was in use till the commencement of this century. So it was at Scarborough, where the offender was dipped into the water from the end of the old pier. But the latest inflictions seemingly were at Leominster, where in 1809 a woman named Jenny Pipes was paraded and ducked near Kerwater Bridge, while another, Sarah Leeke, was wheeled round the town in 1817, but not ducked, the water being too low.

The ducking-stool was not always an effectual punishment. It appears from the records of the King's Bench that in the year 1681 Mrs. Finch, a notorious scold, who had been thrice ducked for scolding, was a fourth time sentenced for the same offence, and sentenced to be fined and imprisoned. Other measures were occasionally taken which were deemed safer, but which were hardly less cruel. The "branks," or bridle, for gossips and scolds, was often preferred to the ducking-stool, which endangered the health, and, moreover, gave the culprit's tongue free play between each dip.

The branks was a species of iron mask, with a gag so contrived as to enter the mouth and forcibly hold down the unruly member. It consisted of a kind of crown or framework of iron, which was locked upon the head and was armed in front with a gag,—a plate or a sharp-cutting knife or point. Various specimens of this barbarous instrument are still extant in local museums, that in the Ashmolean at Oxford being especially noticeable, as well as that preserved in Doddington Park, Lincolnshire. The branks are said to have been the invention of agents of the Spanish Inquisition, and to have been imported into England from the Low Countries, whither it had travelled from Spain.

The brutality of the stronger and governing to the weaker and subject sex was not limited to the ducking-stool and branks. It must be remembered with shame in this more humane age that little more than a hundred years ago women were publicly whipped at the whipping-post near the stocks, or at any cart's tail. The fierce statute against vagrants of Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's reign made no distinction of sex, and their ferocious provisions to the effect that offenders "should be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped till the body should be bloody," long continued in force. Men with their wives and children were flogged publicly, and sometimes by the order of the clergyman of the parish. Girls of twelve and thirteen, aged women of sixty, all suffered alike; women "distracted," in other words out of their minds, were arrested and lashed; so were those that had the smallpox, and all who walked about the country and begged. On the first introduction of the treadwheel in the early decades of the last century, its use was not restricted to males, and women were often made to suffer this punishment. Whipping females was not abolished till 1817. The constable's charge for whipping was fourpence, but the sum was increased latterly to a shilling. The whipping-post was often erected in combination with the stocks. A couple of iron clasps were fixed to the upright which supported the stocks, to take the culprit's hands and hold him securely while he was being lashed. A modification of this plan has long been used at Newgate for the infliction of corporal punishment, and it may still be seen in the old ward at the back of the middle yard.

Ferocious as were most of the methods I have detailed of dealing with offenders against the law, they generally, except by accident, fell short of death. Yet were there innumerable cases in those uncompromising and unenlightened ages in which death alone would be deemed equal to the offences. Rulers might be excused, perhaps, if they were satisfied with nothing less than a criminal's blood.

As Maine says, "The punishment of death is a necessity of society in certain stages of the civilizing process. There is a time when an attempt to dispense with it balks two of the great instincts which lie at the root of all penal law. Without it the community neither feels that it is sufficiently revenged on the criminal, nor thinks that the example of his punishment is adequate to deter others from imitating him." Hence all penal legislation in the past included some form of inflicting the death sentence. These have differed in all ages and in all climes: about some there was a brutal simplicity; others have been marked by great inventiveness, great ingenuity, much refinement of cruelty. Offenders have been stoned, beaten, starved to death; they have been flayed alive, buried alive, cast headlong from heights, torn to pieces by wild animals, broken on the wheel, crucified, impaled, burnt, boiled, beheaded, strangled, drowned. They have been killed outright or by inches, enduring horrible agonies;[172:1] after death their bodies have been dismembered and disembowelled, as a mark of degradation. Irresponsible tyrants went further than lawgivers in devising pains. The Sultan Mechmed cut men in the middle, through the diaphragm, thus causing them to die two deaths at once. It is told of Croesus that he caused a person who had offended him to be scratched to death by a friller's carding-combs. What the Vaivod of Transylvania did to the Polish leader, George Jechel, may be read in the pages of Montaigne. The frightful barbarity to which he and his followers were subjected need not be repeated here.

The tender mercies of continental nations towards criminals may be realized by a reference to one or two of their contrivances for the infliction of death. The Iron Coffin of Lissa, for example, wherein the convicted person lay for days awaiting death from the fell pressure of the heavily weighted lid, which slid down slowly, almost imperceptibly, upon his helpless frame; or the Virgin of Baden Baden, the brazen statue whose kiss meant death with frightful tortures, the unhappy culprit being commanded to prostrate himself and kiss the statue, but as he raised his lips a trap-door opened at his feet, and he fell through on to a spiked wheel, which was set in motion by his fall. There was the chambre À crucer, a short hollow chest lined with sharp stones, in which the victim was packed and buried alive; or the "bernicles," a mattress which clutched the sufferer tight, while his legs were broken by heavy logs of wood; or the long lingering death in the iron cages of Louis XI, the occupant of which could neither sit, stand, nor lie down. Again, the devilish tortures inflicted upon the murderers Ravaillac and Damiens caused a shudder throughout Europe. Ravaillac was burnt piecemeal, flesh was torn from him by red-hot pincers, scalding oil and molten lead were poured upon his bleeding wounds, he was drawn and dismembered by horses while still alive, and only received his coup de grace from the sticks and knives of the hellish bystanders, who rushed in to finish more savagely what the executioner had been unable to complete. As for Damiens, the process followed was identical, but the details preserved of an event nearer our own time are more precise and revolting. He was fastened down upon a platform by iron gyves, one across his breast, the other just above his thighs; his right hand was then burnt with brimstone, he was pinched with red-hot pincers, after which boiling oil, molten wax, rosin, and lead were poured upon his wounds. His limbs were next tightly tied with cords, a long and protracted operation, during which he must have suffered renewed and exquisite torture; four stout, young, and vigorous horses were attached to the cords, and an attempt made to tear his limbs asunder, but only with the result of "extending his joints to a prodigious length," and it was necessary to second the efforts of the horses by cutting the principal sinews of the sufferer. Soon after this the victim expired. Then his body was burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds.

In this country the simpler forms of executions have generally obtained. The stake was no doubt in frequent use at certain periods for particular offences, but the axe and the rope were long the most common instruments of despatch. Death was otherwise inflicted, however. Drowning is mentioned by Stowe as the fate of pirates, and a horrible method of carrying out capital punishment remained in force until 1772. Pressing to death, or the peine forte et dure, was a development of the ancient prison forte et dure, the punishment of those who refused "to stand to the law;" in other words, stood mute, and refused to plead to a charge. Until the reign of Henry IV such persons were condemned to penance and perpetual imprisonment, but the penance meant confinement in a narrow cell and absolute starvation. Some evaded the dread consequences, and therefore a more awful form of torture was introduced with the object of compelling the silent to speak. An accused person who persistently stood mute was solemnly warned three times of the penalty that waited on his obstinacy, and given a few hours for consideration. If the prisoner continued contumacious, the following sentence was passed upon him, or her:

"That you be taken back to the prison whence you came to a low dungeon, into which no light can enter; that you be laid on your back on the bare floor with a cloth round your loins, but elsewhere naked; that there be set upon your body a weight of iron as great as you can bear—and greater; that you have no sustenance, save on the first day three morsels of the coarsest bread, on the second day three draughts of stagnant water from the pool nearest the prison door, on the third day again three morsels of bread as before, and such bread and such water alternately from day to day till you die."

The press was a form of torture with this difference that, when once applied, there was seldom any escape from it. The practice of tying the thumbs with whipcord was another form of torture inflicted to oblige an accused person to plead, and in force as late as the reign of Queen Anne.

Regarding the peine forte et dure Holinshed says, that when accused felons stood mute of malice on arraignment they were pressed to death "by heavy weights laid upon a board that lieth over their breasts and a sharp stone under their backs, and these commonly hold their peace thereby to save their goods unto their wives and children, which if they were condemned should be confiscated to the prince." There are continual references to the peine forte et dure in the legal records throughout the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In 1605 Walter Calverly, Esq., of Calverly in Yorkshire, who was arraigned for the murder of his wife and two children, stood mute, and was pressed to death in York Castle. Another notable instance of the application of this fearful punishment was in the case of Major Strangways, who was arraigned in February, 1657-58, for the murder of his brother-in-law Mr. Fussell. He refused to plead unless he was assured that if condemned he might be shot as his brother-in-law had been. In addition he said that he wished to preserve his estate from confiscation. Chief Justice Glyn reasoned with him at length, but could not alter his decision, and he was duly sentenced to the peine forte et dure. The sentence ran that he was to be put into a mean room where no light could enter, and where he was to be laid upon his back with his body bare; his legs and arms were to be stretched out with cords, and then iron and stone were to be laid upon him "as much as he could bear—and more;" his food the first day was to be three morsels of barley bread, and on the second day he was "to drink thrice of water in the channel next to the prison, but no spring or fountain water—and this shall be his punishment till he dies."

Strangways suffered in Newgate. He was attended to the last by five pious divines, and spent much of his time in prayer. On the day of execution he appeared all in white "waistcoat, stockings, drawers, and cap, over which was cast a long mourning-cloak," and so was "guarded down to a dungeon in the press-yard, the dismal place of execution." On his giving the appointed signal, "his mournful attendants performed their dreadful task. They soon perceived that the weight they laid on was not sufficient to put him suddenly out of pain, so several of them added their own weight, that they might sooner release his soul." He endured great agonies. His groans were "loud and doleful," and it was eight or ten minutes before he died. After death his body was exposed to view, and it was seen that an angle of the press had been purposely placed over his heart, so that he might the sooner be deprived of life, "though he was denied what is usual in these cases, to have a sharp piece of timber under his back to hasten execution."

In 1721, Nathaniel Hawes, who had come to be what we should to-day call an habitual criminal, and who had been frequently in Newgate, took to the road. After various successful adventures, he stopped a gentleman on Finchley Common, who was more than his match and made him prisoner. He was conveyed to London and committed to Newgate. When brought to the bar of the Old Bailey he refused to plead, giving as his reason that he meant to die as he had lived, like a gentleman. When he was seized, he said he had on a fine suit of clothes, which he intended to have gone to the gallows in, but they had been taken from him. "Unless they are returned, I will not plead," he went on, "for no one shall say that I was hanged in a dirty shirt and a ragged coat." He was warned what would be the consequences of his contempt of the law, but he obstinately persevered, and was accordingly sentenced to the press. He bore a weight of 250 pounds for about seven minutes, and then gave in, being unable any longer to bear the pain. On return to court he pleaded "Not guilty," but was convicted and sentenced to death.

Two years later, William Spiggot and Thomas Phillips, arraigned for highway robbery, refused to plead, and were also sentenced to the press. Phillips, on coming into the press-yard, was affrighted by the apparatus, and begged that he might be taken back to court to plead, "a favour that was granted him; it might have been denied him." Spiggot, however, remained obdurate, and was put under the press, where he continued half an hour with a weight to the amount of 350 pounds on his body; "but, on addition of the fifty pounds more, he likewise begged to plead." Both were then convicted and hanged in the ordinary course of law.

Again, Edward Burnworth, the captain of a gang of murderers and robbers which rose into notoriety on the downfall of Wild, was sentenced to the press at Kingston in 1726, by Lord Chief Justice Raymond and Judge Denton. He bore the weight of 1 cwt. 3 qrs. 2 lbs. on his breast for the space of an hour and three minutes, during which time the high sheriff who attended him used every argument to induce him to plead, but in vain. Burnworth, all the time, was trying to kill himself by striking his head against the floor. At last he was prevailed on to promise to plead, was brought back to court, and duly sentenced to death.

The last instance in which the press was inflicted was at Kilkenny in Ireland. A man named Matthew Ryan stood mute at his trial for highway robbery, and was adjudged by the jury to be guilty of "wilful and affected dumbness and lunacy." He was given some days' grace, but still remaining dumb, he was pressed to death in the public market of Kilkenny. As the weights were put upon him the wretched man broke silence and implored that he might be hanged, but the sheriff could not grant his request.

In 1731 a new press was made and fixed in the press-yard, for the punishment of a highwayman named Cook, but it was not used. At length, in 1772, the law on this head was altered and judgment was awarded against mutes as though convicted or they had confessed. In 1778 one so suffered at the Old Bailey. Finally, it was provided that the court should enter a plea of "Not guilty" when the prisoner refused to plead.

The principal forms of capital punishment, however, as the derivation of the expression implies, have dealt with the head as the most vulnerable part of the body. Death has been and still is most generally inflicted by decapitation and strangulation. The former, except in France, where it came to be universal, was the most aristocratic method; the latter was long applied only to criminals of the baser sort. Until the invention of the guillotine, culprits were beheaded by sword or axe, and were often cruelly mangled by a bungling executioner. It is asserted by the historian that the executioner pursued the Countess of Salisbury about the scaffold, aiming repeated blows at her, before he succeeded in striking off her head. This uncertainty in result was only ended by the ingenious invention of Doctor Guillotin, the prototype of which existed in the time of the Scotch "Maiden." The regent Morton, who introduced this instrument into Scotland, and who himself suffered by it, is said to have patterned it after the Halifax Gibbet.[181:1] Guillotin's machine was not altogether original, but it owed more to the Italian "MannaÏa" than to the "Maiden." Nor, according to Sanson, the French headsman, was he the actual inventor of the notorious instrument guillotine, which bears his name. The guillotine was designed by one Schmidt, a German engineer and artificer of musical instruments. Guillotin enthusiastically adopted Schmidt's design, which he strongly recommended in the assembly, declaring that by it a culprit could not suffer, but only feel a slight freshness on the neck. Louis XVI was decapitated by the guillotine, as was the doctor, its sponsor and introducer.

Strangulation, whether applied by the bowstring, cord, handkerchief, or drop, is as old as the hills. It was inflicted by the Greeks as an especially ignominious punishment. The "sus per coll." was not unknown in the penal law of the Romans, who were in the habit also of exposing the dead convict upon the gibbet, "as a comfortable sight to his friends and relations."

In London various places have been used for the scene of execution. The spot where a murder had been committed was often appropriately selected as the place of retribution. Execution Dock was reserved for pirates and sea-robbers, Tower Hill for persons of rank who were beheaded. Gallows for meaner malefactors were sometimes erected on the latter place, the right to do so being claimed by the city. In the reign of Edward IV, however, there was a conflict of authority between the king and the Corporation on this point. The king's officer set up a scaffold and gallows on Tower Hill, whereupon the mayor and his brethren complained to the king, who replied, that he had not acted in derogation of the city liberties, and caused public proclamation to be made that the city exercised certain rights on Tower Hill. Executions also took place, according to Pennant, at the Standard in Chepe. Three men were beheaded there for rescuing a prisoner, and in 1351 two fishmongers for some unknown crime. Smithfield had long the dismal honour of witnessing the death-throes of offenders. Between Hozier and Cow Lanes was anciently a large pool called Smithfield Pond or Horse Pool, "from the watering of horses there;" to the southwest lay St. John's Court, and close to it the public gallows on the town green. There was a clump of trees in the centre of the green, elms, from which the place of execution was long euphemistically called "The Elms." It was used as such early in the thirteenth century, and distinguished persons, William Fitzosbert, Mortimer, and Sir William Wallace suffered here.

About 1413 the gibbet was removed from Smithfield and put up at the north end of a garden wall belonging to St. Giles's Leper Hospital, "opposite the Pound where the Crown Tavern is at present situate, between the end of St. Giles High Street and Hog Lane." But Smithfield must have been still used after the transfer of the gallows to St. Giles. In 1580 another conflict of jurisdiction, this time between the city and the Lieutenant of the Tower. A gibbet was erected in that year in East Smithfield, at Hog Lane, for the execution of one R. Dod, who had murdered a woman in those parts. "But when the sheriff brought the malefactor there to be hanged Sir Owen Hopton, the Lieutenant of the Tower, commanded the sheriff's officers back again to the west side of a cross that stood there," and which probably marked the extent of the liberties of the Tower. Discussion followed. The sheriffs with their prisoner accompanied the lieutenant into a house to talk it over, "whence after a good stay they all departed." The city gave way—the gibbet was taken down, and the malefactor carried to Tyburn in the same afternoon, where he was executed.

The gallows were no doubt all ready for the business, for Tyburn had been used for executions as long as Smithfield. There were elms also at Tyburn, hence a not uncommon confusion between the two places of execution. Tyebourne has been ingeniously derived from the two words "Tye" and "bourne," the last a bourne or resting-place for prisoners who were taken bound. Pennant gives the derivation "Tye," the name of a brook or "bourne" which flowed through it.

In Loftie's "History of London" he points out that the Tyburn of earliest times was a bleak heath situated at the end of the Marylebone Lane as we know it, and which, as it approached the town, had two branches. He suggests that the brook or "bourne" also divided into two, hence the name "Teo Burne," or two streams. Mr. Waller gives the same derivation, and in one of the earliest mentions of the Tyburn, an ancient chapter at Westminster, dated 951, it is called Teoburne.

There were many Tyburns, however, and as in London the gallows were moved farther and farther westward of the building of houses, so the name of Tyburn travelled from Marylebone Lane to Edgeware Road. As time passed on it came to be the generic name for all places of execution, and was used at York, Liverpool, Dublin, and elsewhere. Tyburn was a kind of Golgotha, a place of infamy and disgrace. When Colonel Blood seized the Duke of Ormond in St. James's Street it was with the avowed intention of carrying him to Tyburn, there to be hanged like a common criminal.

The exact position of the Tyburn gallows has been a matter of some controversy. Mr. Robins places the Elms Lane as the first turning to the right in the Uxbridge Road after getting into it from the Grand Junction Road opposite the Serpentine. In Smith's "History of Marylebone," he states that the gallows stood on a small eminence at the corner of the Edgeware Road near the turnpike. Other authorities fix the place in Connaught Square; because in a lease of one of the houses, No. 49, granted by the Bishop of London, the fact that the gallows once stood on the site is expressly mentioned in the parchment. It was commonly reported that many human bones were exhumed between Nos. 6 and 12, Connaught Place, as well as in the garden of Arklow House, which stands at the southwest angle of the Edgeware Road. But Mr. Loftie states as a matter of fact that no such discovery was ever made. A careful but fruitless search at the time Connaught Place was built produced a single bone, probably part of a human jaw-bone, but nothing more. As to Arklow House, the report is distinctly denied by the owner himself. It is, however, pretty certain that at a later date the gallows were kept at a house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street and the Edgeware Road, in front of which they were erected when required.

A detailed account has been preserved of the execution of Colonel John Turner in 1662, which presents a strange picture of the way in which the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in those days. The scene of the execution was not Tyburn but a place in Leadenhall Street at Lime Street end, a spot near the place where the deed for which Turner suffered was perpetrated. An immense crowd had gathered, as usual, to witness the convict's death. Pepys was there of course, as he tells us; "and after sending my wife to my Aunt Wright's, to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to Change." On his way he met people flocking to the place of execution, and mingling with the crowd, somewhere about St. Mary Axe, "got to stand upon the wheel of a cart for a shilling in great pain above an hour before the execution was done: he delaying the time by long discourses and prayers one after another in hopes of a reprieve, but none came."

Turner was drawn in a cart from Newgate at eleven in the morning, accompanied by the ordinary and another minister with the sheriffs, keeper of the gaol, and other officials in attendance. On coming to the gibbet he called the executioner to him, and presented him with money in lieu of his clothes, which his friends desired to keep. Then standing in the cart, he addressed the crowd with great prolixity. He dwelt on the cardinal sins; he gave a circumstantial account of his birth, parentage, family history; he detailed his war services as a loyal cavalier, with his promotions and various military rewards. With much proper feeling he sought to lessen the blame attached to his accomplices in the murder, and to exonerate the innocent accused. At intervals in this long discourse he was interrupted now by the sheriffs with broad hints to despatch, now by the ordinary as to the irrelevance and impropriety of such remarks from a man about to die. Again the keeper of Newgate taxed him with other crimes, saying, for example, "Pray, Colonel Turner, do you know nothing of a glass jewel delivered to the Countess of Devonshire in room of another?" or "How about the fire in Lothbury, or the mysterious death of your namesake Turner, who died in your house?"

The condemned man discoursed at great length upon these various points, and was again and again reminded that it would be better for him to prepare for his approaching end. Still he continued his harangue and took a new departure when he remembered the condition of the condemned hold of Newgate, into which he had been cast after coming from the sessions. This hole, as it was called, he characterizes as "a most fearful, sad, deplorable place. Hell itself in comparison cannot be such a place. There is neither bench, stool nor stick for any person there; they lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring—it was more terrible to me than this death. I would humbly beg that hole may be provided with some kind of boards, like a court of guard, that a man may lie down upon them in ease; for when they should be best prepared for their ends they are most tormented; they had better take them and hang them as soon as they have their sentence." This aspersion, however, on this part of his gaol the keeper tried to refute by stating that seventeen out of the nineteen poor wretches confined in the hole managed to escape from it.

But the reprieve for which Turner looked in vain still tarried. He was obliged now to fall to his prayers. These, by the Christian charity of the officials, he was permitted to spin out as long as he pleased. Then he went through the ceremony of distributing alms-money for the poor, money for his wife, to be passed on to his young son's schoolmaster. At last he directed the executioner to take the halter off his shoulders, and afterwards, "taking it in his hands, he kissed it, and put it on his neck himself; then after he had fitted the cap and put it on, he went out of the cart up the ladder." The executioner fastened the noose, and "pulling the rope a little, says Turner, 'What, dost thou mean to choke me? Pray, fellow, give me more rope—what a simple fellow is this! How long have you been executioner, that you know not how to put the knot?'" At the very last moment, in the midst of some private ejaculations, espying a gentlewoman at a window nigh, he kissed his hand, saying, "Your servant, mistress," and so he was "turned off," as Pepys says of him, "a comely-looking man he was, and kept his countenance to the last. I was sorry to see him. It was believed there were at least twelve or fourteen thousand people in the street."

There was nothing new in this desire to gloat over the dying agonies of one's fellow creatures. The Roman matron cried "habet," and turned down her thumb when the gladiator despatched his prostrate foe. Great dignitaries and high-born dames have witnessed without a shudder the tortures of an auto da fÉ; to this day it is the fashion for delicately nurtured ladies to flock to the Law Courts, and note the varying emotions, from keenest anguish to most brutal sang-froid, of notorious murderers on trial. It is not strange, then, that in uncultivated and comparatively demoralized ages the concourse about the gallows should be great, or the conduct of the spectators riotous, brutal, often heartless in the extreme. There was always a rush to see an execution. The crowd was extraordinary when the sufferers were persons of note or had been concerned in any much-talked-of case. Thus all London turned out to stare at the hanging of Vratz, Boroski, and Stern, convicted of the murder of Mr. Thynne, of which Count Konigsmark had been acquitted. The execution took place in 1682 on the gallows which had been set up in Pall Mall, the scene of the crime. "Many hundreds of standings were taken up by persons of quality and others." The Duke of Monmouth, one of the most intimate friends of the murdered man, was among the spectators in a balcony close by the gallows, and was the cynosure of every eye, fixing the glance of even one of the convicts, Captain Vratz, who stared at him fixedly till the drop fell.

The fashion of gazing at these painful exhibitions grew more and more popular. Horace Walpole satirizes the vile practice of thus glorifying criminals. "You cannot conceive," he says to Sir Horace Mann, "the ridiculous rage there is of going to Newgate, the prints that are published of the malefactors, and the memoirs of their lives set forth with as much parade as Marshal Turrenne's." George Selwyn, chief among the wits and beaux of his time, was also conspicuous for his craving for such horrid sights. He was characterized by Walpole as a friend whose passion it was to see coffins, corpses, and executions. Judges going on assize wrote to Selwyn, promising him a good place at all the executions which might take place on their circuits. Other friends kept him informed of approaching events, and bespoke a seat for him, or gave full details of the demeanour of those whose sufferings he had not been privileged to see. Thus Henry St. John writes to tell him of the execution of Waistcott, Lord Huntington's butler, for burglary: which he attended, with his brother, at the risk of breaking their necks, "by climbing up an old rotten scaffolding, which I feared would tumble before the cart drove off with the six malefactors." St. John goes on to say that he had a full view of Waistcott, "who went to the gallows with a white cockade in his hat as an emblem of his innocence, and died with some hardness, as appeared through his trial." Another correspondent, Gilly Williams, gives additional particulars. "The dog died game: went in the cart in a blue and white frock ... and the white cockade. He ate several oranges on his passage, inquired if his hearse was ready, and then, as old Rowe would say, was launched into eternity." Again George Townshend, writing to Selwyn from Scotland of the Jacobites, promises him plenty more entertainment on Tower Hill. The joke went round that Selwyn at the dentist's gave the signal for drawing a tooth by dropping his handkerchief, just as people did to the executioner on the scaffold. He would go anywhere to see men turned off. He was present when Lord Lovat was decapitated, and justified himself by saying that he had made amends in going to the undertaker's to see the head sewn on again. So eager was he to miss no sight worth seeing, that he went purposely to Paris to witness the torture of the unhappy Damiens. "On the day of the execution," Jesse tells us, "he mingled with the crowd in a plain undress suit and bob wig; when a French nobleman, observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and imagining from the plainness of his attire that he must be a person in the humbler ranks of life, resolved that he must infallibly be a hangman. 'Eh bien, monsieur,' he said, 'Etes vous arrivÉ pour voir ce spectacle?' 'Oui, monsieur.' 'Vous Êtes bourreau?' 'Non, monsieur,' replied Selwyn, 'je n'ai pas l'honneur; je ne suis qu'un amateur.'"

It was in these days, or a little later, when Newgate became the scene of action, that an execution was made the occasion of a small festivity at the prison. The governor gave a breakfast after the ceremony to some thirteen or fourteen people of distinction, and his daughter, a very pretty girl, did the honours of the table. According to her account, few did much justice to the viands: the first call of the inexperienced was for brandy, and the only person with a good appetite for her broiled kidneys, a celebrated dish of hers, was the ordinary. After breakfast was over the whole party adjourned to see the cutting down.

That which was a morbid curiosity among a certain section of the upper classes became a fierce hungry passion with the lower. The scenes upon execution days almost baffle description. Dense crowds thronged the approaches to Newgate and the streets leading to Tyburn or other places of execution. It was a ribald, reckless, brutal mob, violently combative, fighting and struggling for foremost places, fiercely aggressive, distinctly abusive. Spectators often had their limbs broken, their teeth knocked out, sometimes they were crushed to death. Barriers could not always restrain the crowd, and were often borne down and trampled underfoot. All along the route taken by the procession people vented their feelings upon the doomed convicts: cheering a popular criminal to the echo, offering him nosegays or unlimited drink; railing and storming, on the other hand, at those they hated or, worse still, despised. When Earl Ferrers was hanged in 1760 the concourse was so great that the procession took three hours to travel from Newgate to Tyburn. Lord Ferrers told the sheriff that passing through such a multitude was ten times worse than death itself. The same brutality was carried to the foot of the gallows. The mob surged around the cart conversing with the condemned: now encouraging, now upbraiding, anon making him a target for all manner of missiles, and this even at the last awful moment, when the convict was on his knees wrapped in prayer. A woman named Barbara Spencer was beaten down by a stone when actually in supplication upon her knees. When Jack Sheppard, that most popular but most depraved young criminal, was executed, an incredible number of persons was present. The crowd was unruly enough even before execution, but afterwards it grew perfectly frantic. When the body had hung the appointed time, an undertaker ventured to appear with a hearse to carry it off, but being taken for a surgeon's man about to remove Jack Sheppard to the dissecting-room, he incurred the fierce displeasure of the mob. They demolished the hearse, then fell upon the undertaker, who with difficulty escaped with life. After that they seized the body and carried it off, throwing it from hand to hand, until it was covered with bruises and dirt. It was taken as far as the Barley Mow in Long Acre, where it lay some hours, and until it was discovered that the whole thing was a trick devised by a bailiff in the pay of the surgeons, and that the body had been forcibly taken from a person who really intended to bury it. The mob was now excited to frenzy, and a serious riot followed. The police being quite inadequate to quell it, the military were called in, and with the aid of several detachments of Guards the ringleaders were secured. The body was given over to a friend of Sheppard's to bury, the mob dispersed to attend it to St. Martin's Fields, where it was deposited under a guard of soldiers and eventually buried.

While these wild revels were kept up both before and after the execution the demeanour of the doomed partook too often of the general recklessness. The calendars are full of particulars of the manner in which condemned convicts met their fate. Many awaited the extreme penalty and endured it with callous indifference or flippant effrontery. Only now and again did their courage break down at the eleventh hour, and so prove that it was assumed. A few notable examples may be cited as exhibiting their various moods. Paul Lewis, once a lieutenant in the royal navy, but an irreclaimable scoundrel, who took eventually to the road, and was sentenced to death for highway robbery, was boldly unconcerned after sentence. In Newgate he was the leader of the revels: they dubbed him captain, like Macheath; he sat at the head of the table, swore at the parson, and sang obscene songs. It was not until the warrant of execution arrived at the prison, that all bravado evaporated, and he became as abject as he had before appeared hardened. John Rann the highwayman, better known as Sixteen String Jack, had a farewell dinner-party after he was convicted, and while awaiting execution: the company included seven girls; "all were remarkable cheerful, nor was Rann less joyous than his companions." Dick Turpin made elaborate preparations for his execution; purchased a new suit of fustian and a pair of pumps to wear at the gallows, and hired five poor men at ten shillings per head, to follow his cart as mourners, providing them with hat-bands and mourning-bands. Nathaniel Parkhurst, who, when in the Fleet for debtors, murdered a fellow prisoner, demolished a roast fowl at breakfast on the morning of his execution, and drank a pint of liquor with it. Jerry Abershaw was persistently callous from first to last. Returning from court across Kennington Common, he asked his conductors whether that was the spot on which he was to be twisted? His last days in the condemned cell he spent in drawing upon the walls with the juice of black cherries designs of the various robberies he had committed on the road. Abershaw's sang-froid did not desert him on the last day. He appeared with his shirt thrown open, a flower in his mouth, and all the way to the gallows carried on an incessant conversation with friends who rode by his side, nodding to others he recognized in the crowd, which was immense. The season was the summer, and on the Sunday following the execution, London was like a deserted city; hundreds of thousands went out to see him hanging in chains.

Still more awful was the conduct of Hannah Dagoe, a herculean Irish woman, who plied the trade of porter at Covent Garden. In Newgate while under sentence she was most defiant. She was the terror of her fellow prisoners, and actually stabbed a man who had given evidence against her. When the cart was drawn in under the gallows she got her arms loose, seized the executioner, struggled with him, and gave him so violent a blow on the chest that she nearly knocked him down. She dared him to hang her, and tearing off her hat, cloak, and other garments, the hangman's perquisites, distributed them among the crowd in spite of him. After a long struggle he got the rope around her neck. This accomplished, she drew her handkerchief from round her head over her face, and threw herself out of the cart before the signal was given with such violence that she broke her neck and died instantly. Many ancient customs long retained tended to make them more hardened. Chief among these was the offer of strong drink by the way. When the gallows stood at St. Giles it was the rule to offer malefactors about to be hanged a great bowl of ale, "as the last refreshment they were to receive in this life." This drink was long known as the "St. Giles's Bowl." The practice of giving drink was pretty general for years later and in many parts of the country. In Yorkshire at Bawtry, so the story runs, a saddler was on his way to be hanged. The bowl was brought out, but he refused it and went on to his death. Meanwhile his reprieve was actually on the road, and had he lingered to drink time sufficient would have been gained to save him. Hence came the saying that "the saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale." Other convicts are mentioned in an uncomplimentary manner because they dared to smoke on their road to the gallows. "Some mad knaves took tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn." This was in 1598, when the use of the weed introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh was still somewhat rare. A hundred years later the misbehaviour was in "impudently calling for sack" and drinking King James's health; after which the convicts affronted the ordinary at the gallows, and refused his assistance.

There were few who behaved with the decency and self-possession of Lord Ferrers, who went to his shameful death in a suit of white and silver, that, it is said, in which he had been married. He himself provided the white cap to be pulled over his face, and the black silk handkerchief with which his arms were to be bound. His last words were, "Am I right?" and immediately the drop fell. In his case there had been an unseemly wrangle upon the gallows between the executioner and his assistant. Lord Ferrers had given the latter, in mistake for his chief, a fee of five guineas, which the head executioner claimed, and the assistant would not readily surrender. Some were in abject terror till the last act commenced. Thus John Ayliffe, a forger, was in the utmost agonies the night preceding his execution; his agitation producing an intolerable thirst, which he vainly sought to allay by copious draughts of water. Yet his composure quite returned on his road to Tyburn, and he "behaved with decency at the fatal tree." It was just the reverse with Mrs. Meteyard, who with her daughter murdered a parish apprentice. She was in a fit when put into the cart, and she continued insensible all the way to Tyburn. Great efforts were made to restore her, but without avail, and she was in an unconscious state when hanged.

It may be questioned whether that close attention was paid to the spiritual needs of the condemned which is considered indispensable in these more humane days. No doubt many rejected the offers of the ordinary, refusing to attend chapel, pretending to belong to out-of-the-way persuasions, and still declining the ministrations of clergymen of any creed; others pretended, like Dean Swift's Tom Clinch, that they went off with a clear conscience and a calm spirit, without prayer-book or psalm. But very probably this indifference to the ordinary and his ghostly counsels arose from a suspicion that he was not very earnest in what he said. The Newgate ordinary, although a sound Protestant, was a father confessor to all criminals. Not the least profitable part of his emoluments came from the sale of his account of the execution of convicts, a species of gaol calendar which he compiled from information the condemned men themselves supplied. That the ordinary attached great value to this production is clear from the petition made by one of them, the Reverend Paul Lorraine, to the House of Commons, that his pamphlet might be exempted from the tax levied upon paper. It is easy to understand that the ordinary might have been better employed than in compiling these accounts, however interesting they may be, as illustrating the crime of the last century. It is also pretty certain that, although, doubtless, blameless and exemplary men, Newgate chaplains were not always over-zealous in the discharge of their sacred office in regard to the condemned. There were many grim jokes among the prisoners themselves as to the value of the parson's preaching. Thus in the Reverend Mr. Cotton's time as ordinary, convicts were said to go out of the world with their ears stuffed full of cotton; and his interpretation of any particular passage in Scripture was said to go in at one ear and out at the other.[200:1] Hence the intrusion, which must have seemed to them unwarrantable, of dissenting and other amateur preachers, or well-meaning enthusiasts, who devoted themselves with unremitting vigour to the spiritual consolation of all prisoners who would listen to them. It is impossible to speak otherwise than most approvingly of the single-minded, self-sacrificing devotion of such men as Silas Told, the forerunner of Howard, Mrs. Fry, the Gurneys, and other estimable philanthropists. Nevertheless unseemly polemical wrangles appeared to have been the result of this interference, which was better meant than appreciated by the authorized clerical officer. Doctor Doran, referring to the execution of James Sheppard (Jacobite Sheppard, not Jack), gives an account of a conflict of this kind. "Sheppard's dignity," he says, "was not even ruffled by the renewed combat in the cart of the Newgate chaplain and the nonjuror. Each sought to comfort and confound the culprit according to his way of thinking. Once more the messengers of peace got to fisticuffs, but as they neared Tyburn the nonjuror kicked Paul (the ordinary) out of the cart, and kept by the side of Sheppard till the rope was adjusted. There he boldly, as those Jacobite nonjurors were wont, gave the passive lad absolution for the crime for which he was about to pay the penalty; after which he jumped down to have a better view of the sorry spectacle from the foremost ranks of spectators."

It was no doubt on account of the insufficiency of the spiritual consolations offered to the condemned that led old Richard Dove, or Dow, to make his endowment for tolling the prisoner's bell. He bequeathed fifty pounds a year for ever, so Stowe tells us, for this philanthropic purpose.

When condemned prisoners were being "drawn to their executions at Tyburn," a man with a bell stood in the churchyard by St. Sepulchre's, by the wall next the street, and so to put them in mind of their death approaching. Later on these verses took the form of exhortation, of which the following is the substance:

"You prisoners that are within, who for wickedness and sin, after many mercies shown you, are now appointed to die to-morrow in the forenoon: give ear and understand that to-morrow morning the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre's shall toll for you, in form and manner of a passing bell, as used to be tolled for those who are at the point of death, to the end that all godly people hearing that bell, and knowing it is for you going to your death, may be stirred up heartily to pray to God to bestow His grace and mercy upon you whilst you live. I beseech you, for Jesus Christ His sake, to keep this night in watching and prayer for the salvation of your own souls, whilst there is yet time and place for mercy; as knowing to-morrow you must appear before the judgment-seat of your Creator, there to give an account of all things done in this life, and to suffer eternal torments for your sins, committed against Him, unless upon your hearty and unfeigned repentance you find mercy, through the merits, death, and passion of your only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ, who now sits at the right hand of God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return to Him."

In times when scaffold and gallows were perpetually crowded, the executioner was a prominent if not exactly a distinguished personage. The office might not be honourable, but it was not without its uses, and the man who filled it was an object of both interest and dread. In some countries the dismal paraphernalia—axe, gibbet, or rack—have been carried by aristocratic families on their arms. The Scotch Dalziels bear sable, a hanged man with his arms extended; a Spanish hidalgo has in his coat armour a ladder with gibbet; and various implements of torture have been borne by German families of distinction.

In France the post of executioner was long hereditary, regularly transmitted from father to son, for many generations, and enjoyed eventually something of the credit vouchsafed to all hereditary offices. With us the law's finisher has never been held in great esteem. He was on a par rather with the Roman carnifex, an odious official, who was not suffered to live within the precincts of the city. The only man who would condescend to the work was usually a condemned criminal, pardoned for the very purpose. Derrick, one of the first names mentioned, was sentenced to death, but pardoned by Lord Essex, whom he afterwards executed. Next to him I find that one Bull acted as executioner about 1593. Then came Gregory Brandon, the man who is generally supposed to have decapitated Charles I, and who was commonly addressed by his Christian name only. Through an error Brandon was advanced to the dignity of a squire by Garter, king at arms, and succeeding executioners were generally honoured with the same title. Brandon was followed by his son; young Brandon by Squire Dun, who gave place in his turn to John Ketch, the godfather of all modern hangmen. Many of the immediate successors of Brandon above-mentioned were called Gregory. Jack Ketch did not give entire satisfaction. It is recorded in Luttrell that Ketch was dispossessed in favour of Pascal Roose, a butcher, who served only a few months, when Ketch was restored. After Ketch, John Price was the man, a pardoned malefactor, who could not resist temptation, and was himself executed for murder by some one else. Dennis, the hangman at the Lord George Gordon riots, had also been sentenced to death for complicity, but obtained forgiveness on condition that he should string up his former associates.

They did their work roughly, these early practitioners. Sometimes the rope slipped or the drop was insufficient, and the hangman had to add his weight, assisted by that of zealous spectators, to the sufferer's legs to effect strangulation. Now and again the rope broke, and the convict had to be tied up a second time. This happened with Captain Kidd, the notorious pirate, who was perfectly conscious during the time which elapsed before he was again tied up. The friends of another pirate, John Gow, were anxious to put him out of his pain, and pulled his legs so hard, that the rope broke before he was dead, necessitating the repetition of the whole ceremony. Even when the operation had been successfully performed, the hanged man sometimes cheated the gallows.

There are several well-authenticated cases of resuscitation after hanging, due doubtless to the rude and clumsy plan of killing. To slide off a ladder or drop from a cart might and generally did produce asphyxia, but there was no instantaneous fracture of the vertebral column as in most executions of modern times. The earliest case on record is that of Tiretta de Balsham, whom Henry III pardoned in 1264 because she had survived hanging. As she is said to have been suspended from one morning till sunrise the following day, it is difficult to believe the story, which was probably one of many mediÆval impostures. Females, however, appear to have had more such escapes than males. Doctor Ploto gives several instances; one, that of Anne Green, who in 1650 came to when in the hands of the doctors for dissection; another of Mrs. Cope, hanged at Oxford in 1658, who was suspended for an unusually long period, and afterwards let fall violently, yet she recovered, only to be more effectually hanged next day. A third substantiated case was that of half-hanged Maggie Dickson, who was hanged at Edinburgh in 1728, and whom the jolting of the cart in which her body was removed from the gallows recovered. The jolting was considered so infallible a recipe for bringing to, that it was generally practised by an executed man's friends in Ireland, where also the friends were in the habit of holding up the convict by his waistband after he had dropped, "so that the rope should not press upon his throat," the sheriff philanthropically pretending not to see.

Sir William Petty, the eminent surgeon in Queen Anne's time, owed his scientific fame to his having resuscitated a woman who had been hanged. The body had been begged, as was the custom, for the anatomical lecture; Petty finding symptoms of life, bled her, put her to bed with another woman, and gave her spirits and other restoratives. She recovered, whereupon the students subscribed to endow her with a small portion, and she soon after married and lived for fifteen years. The case of half-hanged Smith was about the date 1705. He was reprieved, but the reprieve arrived after he had been strung up; he was taken down, bled, and brought to. Smith afterwards described his sensations minutely. The weight of his body when he first dropped caused him great pain; his "spirits" forced their way up to his head and seemed to go out at his eyes with a great blaze of light, and then all pain left him. But on his resuscitation the blood and "spirits" forcing themselves into their proper channels gave him such intolerable suffering "that he could have wished those hanged who cut him down." William Duell, hanged in 1740, was carried to Surgeon's Hall, to be anatomized; but as his body was being laid out, one of the servants who was washing him perceived that he was still alive. A surgeon bled him, and in two hours he was able to sit up in his chair. Later in the evening he was sent back to Newgate, and his sentence changed to transportation. In 1767, a man who had hanged for twenty-eight minutes was operated on by a surgeon, who made an incision into the windpipe. In less than six hours the hanged man revived. It became a constant practice for a condemned man's friends to carry off the body directly it was cut down to the nearest surgeon's, who at once operated on it by bleeding, and so forth. The plan was occasionally, but rarely, successful. It was tried with Doctor Dodd, who was promptly carried to an undertaker's in Tottenham Court Road and placed in a hot bath; but he had been too well hanged for recovery. A report was long current that Fauntleroy the banker, who was executed for forgery, had been resuscitated, but it was quite without foundation.

The Tyburn procession survived till towards the end of the eighteenth century. It had many supporters, Doctor Johnson among the number. "Sir," he told Boswell, when Tyburn had been discontinued, "executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they do not answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" The reason is given by the sheriffs in the year 1784, and it is convincing. In a pamphlet published that year it is set forth that the procession to Tyburn was a hideous mockery on the law; the final scene had lost its terrors; it taught no lesson of morality to the beholders, but tended to the encouragement of vice. The day of execution was deemed a public holiday to which thousands thronged, many to gratify an unaccountable curiosity, more to seize an opportunity for committing fresh crimes. "If we take a view of the supposed solemnity from the time at which the criminal leaves the prison to the last moment of his existence, it will be found to be a period full of the most shocking and disgraceful circumstances. If the only defect were the want of ceremony, the minds of the spectators might be supposed to be left in a state of indifference; but when they view the meanness of the apparatus, the dirty cart and ragged harness, surrounded by a sordid assemblage of the lowest among the vulgar, their sentiments are inclined more to ridicule than pity. The whole progress is attended with the same effect. Numbers soon thicken into a crowd of followers, and then an indecent levity is heard." The crowd gathered as it went, the levity increased, "till on reaching the fatal tree it became a riotous mob, and their wantonness of speech broke forth in profane jokes, swearing, and blasphemy." The officers of the law were powerless to check the tumult; no attention was paid to the convict's dying speech—"an exhortation to shun a vicious life, addressed to thieves actually engaged in picking pockets." The culprit's prayers were interrupted, his demeanour if resigned was sneered at, and only applauded when he went with brazen effrontery to his death. "Thus," says the pamphlet, "are all the ends of public justice defeated; all the effects of example, the terrors of death, the shame of punishment, are all lost."

The evils it was hoped might be obviated "were public executions conducted with becoming form and solemnity, if order were preserved and every tendency to disturb it suppressed." Hence the place of execution was changed in 1784 from "Tyburn to the great area that has lately been opened before Newgate." The sheriffs were doubtful of their power to make alterations, and consulted the judges, who gave it as their opinion that it was within the sheriffs' competence. "With this sanction, therefore," the sheriffs go on to say, "we have proceeded, and instead of carting the criminals through the streets to Tyburn, the sentence of death is executed in the front of Newgate, where upwards of five thousand persons may easily assemble; here a temporary scaffold hung with black is erected, and no other persons are permitted to ascend it than the necessary officers of justice, the clergyman, and the criminal, and the crowd is kept at a proper distance. During the whole time of the execution a funeral bell is tolled in Newgate, and the prisoners are kept in the strictest order."

The horrors of executions were but little diminished by the substitution of the Old Bailey as the scene. Seventy-four years were to elapse before the wisdom of legislators and the good sense of the public insisted that the extreme penalty of the law should be carried out in strictest privacy within the walls of the gaol.

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