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 It was shortly after withdrawn, placed in the chains, and these cold-rivetted—truly enough “fast bound in misery and iron.”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.”

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:—

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]

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]