London: The Biography полностью

The cart was halted just before the gallows. Those about to die were escorted on to another carriage especially built like a platform for the occasion; it was driven beneath the triple tree. The halters were placed around the necks of the condemned, the horses kicked into action, and there the malefactors would be suspended until death overtook their pains. At this point friends and relatives might be seen “tugging at the hanging men’s feet so that they should die quicker, and not suffer.”

When the corpses were cut down there was a general rush for them, since the bodies of the hanged were believed to be of curious efficacy in the healing of disease. The London Encyclopaedia remarks upon one Frenchman who noted “a young woman, with an appearance of beauty, all pale and trembling, in the arms of the executioner, who submitted to have her bosom uncovered in the presence of thousands of spectators and the dead man’s hand placed upon it.” There was a disturbing paganism latent beneath the surface of this piece of dramatic theatre. In the mid-seventeenth century such a severed hand could command the price of ten guineas, since “the possession of the hand was thought to be of still greater efficacy in the cure of diseases and prevention of misfortunes.”

There was also a general struggle over the body, conducted between those who wished to retain it for their own purposes and those hired assistants come to transport it to the surgeons for dissection. In the mêlée “the populace often come to blows as to who will carry the bought corpses to the parents who are waiting in coaches and cabs to receive them.” It was all “most diverting,” again according to Ferdinand de Saussure, who was sitting in one of the stands which surrounded the whole event.

One thief and housebreaker, John Haynes, displayed signs of life after being escorted to the house of a famous surgeon. He was asked what he remembered-“The last thing I recollect was going up Holborn Hill in a cart. I thought then that I was in a beautiful green field; and that is all I remember till I found myself in your honour’s dissecting room.” So he came to death, and to life, babbling of green fields.

London did indeed become the city of the gallows. In 1776 the Morning Post reported “that the criminals capitally convicted at the Old Bailey shall in future be executed at the cross road near the ‘Mother Red Cap’ inn, the half-way house to Hampstead, and that no galleries, scaffolds or other temporary stages be built near the place.” This measure was promoted in order to curb rioting among the spectators at a time when a fierce radicalism characterised the politics of London. The site of the executions was, typically, at a crossroads where the present Camden Town Underground Station now stands. Other crossroads were also used as a natural location for the gallows, sending travellers upon their ambiguous journey-the division between the City Road and Goswell Road in Islington was once in use-but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was also customary to hang offenders on or near the spot where their crimes had been committed. In 1790, for example, two arsonists were hanged in Aldersgate Street immediately opposite the house which they had fired. The last recorded example of topographical killing occurred in Skinner Street, in 1817, when a thief was despatched in front of the shop of a gunsmith which he had plundered.

At Wapping lay Execution Dock, the place of punishment for all those who had committed high crimes upon the high seas, while the suspended bodies of the hanged could be seen swaying opposite Blackwall and other sites along the Thames such as Bugsby’s Hole. The bodies of the condemned could also be seen at Aldgate and Pentonville, St. Giles and Smithfield, Blackheath and Finchley, Kennington Common and Hounslow Heath, so that these mementoes caught the attention of all those travelling into, or out of, London. It was not a pleasant prospect. Murderers, for example, were “first hung on the common gibbet, their bodies are then covered with tallow and fat substances, over this is placed a tarred shirt fastened down with iron bands, and the bodies are hung with chains to the gibbet … and there it hangs till it falls to dust.” Why this should have been considered an appropriate spectacle for those leaving or entering London is another matter; it is curiously reminiscent of the fact that the principal gates or entrances to the city were also used as prisons, and suggests an attitude both defensive and minatory.