Olde Cotswold Punishments E-Book

Nell Darby

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 156

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Look beyond the pretty cottages and gentle landscapes of the Cotswolds, and you will find a dark history of crime and punishment. From child thieves, poachers, conmen, prostitutes and would-be suicides to bigamists, highwaymen and murderers, the Cotswolds has had its fair share of criminals – treated in what appears to us today to be an arbitrary and often unduly harsh manner by judges and juries. What crimes were committed in this rural society in the past, and how were they punished? This book looks at the variety of punishments bestowed to miscreants – from being hanged from a portable gallows at the scene of a crime to transportation or hard labour – and why some were punished more than others. Evidence is taken from contemporary sources: prison records, newspaper accounts and broadsides that celebrated the lives and deaths of local characters. It is a fascinating and shocking read.

Leseprobe

Olde

COTSWOLD

PUNISHMENTS

Olde

COTSWOLD

PUNISHMENTS

Nell Darby

First published 2011

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Nell Darby, 2011, 2013

The right of Nell Darby to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5279 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.

Burned at the Stake

2.

Hanged in Chains

3.

Branding

4.

Imprisonment

5.

Transportation

6.

Whipping

7.

The Pillory

8.

The Stocks

9.

The Ducking Stool

10.

Workhouse Punishments

11.

School Punishments

Conclusion

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the staff of the Gloucestershire Archives and National Archives for their help in obtaining records for me – in some cases they were very musty eighteenth-century archives that looked as though they hadn’t been accessed in quite some time!

I would also like to thank my family – John, Jake and Eva Darby – for their encouragement and support throughout the research and writing process.

INTRODUCTION

Crime and punishment have both fascinated and repelled us for centuries, but in an age and society where the usual punishment for crimes consists of community service, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBO), or prison sentences regarded by the right-wing media as little different to short stays in hotels, the punishments of the past seem both different and more imaginative.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, many common law crimes were punishable by hanging, and although statutes were brought in from then on that limited the use of the death penalty, there were still, to our eyes, a multitude of crimes that could be punished by death. In fact, the Bloody Code of the eighteenth century enabled courts to sentence to death those guilty of minor property crimes, such as thefts, that to us seem very petty. Hanging was usual, but burning at the stake, being hanged in chains, or being drawn and quartered were also accepted forms of punishment practiced well into the eighteenth century. Suicides fared little better; if someone was deemed to have been sane when they killed themselves, regardless of the reasons for their decision, they would be buried in unconsecrated ground. One Gloucestershire man, Samuel Cooper, who had hanged himself from a bacon rack at his house in the Forest of Dean in 1752, was buried at a crossroads outside his town, with a stake driven through his body.1

And those punishments that allowed criminals to stay alive seem little better than the death penalty. Many men and women were ordered to be transported to America, and, after the Civil War, to Australia – countries far, far away from their homes, families and friends, where they risked dying on the voyage out, and might have to stay for life.

Punishments for petty crimes seem, to modern eyes, arbitrary and overly severe in many cases, with some punishments designed to humiliate the criminal in front of his neighbours – most parishes, towns and counties had their own pillories, stocks, or whipping posts. Some punishments were targeted at women who transgressed the unwritten rules of society, with ducking ponds and scolds’ bridles designed to embarrass and quieten women seen as being scolds to their husbands or generally troublesome.

The people of the Cotswolds, although fascinated by tales of crime, seemed to find the punishments meted out in other areas more interesting than those in their own region – perhaps in the belief that they were a more civilised region, and so could read about crimes in other areas as though not affecting them. The Gloucester Journal throughout the eighteenth century contained many stories of miscreants being punished in London and the south-east, as well as promotions for execution ballads and pamphlets, yet rarely covered convictions in Gloucestershire. There was the odd mention of the assizes, but it was usually to detail those people who would be tried, rather than covering their trials or convictions.

In August 1730, for example, the Gloucester Journal featured convictions at the assizes in Kingston, Surrey, eagerly reporting that ‘one was burnt in the Hand for manslaughter, several Order’d for Transportation, and four to be whipt.’2 Perhaps the branding of the hand was rare enough in England to merit a mention in this local paper, although there were plenty of whipping and transportation sentences in Gloucestershire without mentioning those in Surrey.

However, the Gloucester Journal saw its role as covering national and international events, enabling literate Gloucestershire folk to learn about the wider world and feel quite cosmopolitan. Local events, which would have made the paper appear too provincial, were reduced to a few lines, so given far less prominence than the many adverts for products and shops in the area.

This skewing of coverage of the assizes has the effect of making it look as though the Cotswolds, and Gloucestershire as a whole, were more law-abiding than other parts of England, but this wasn’t the case; there were plenty of local trials, as the brief mentions in the Gloucester Journal’s inquest and court coverage show. The patterns in cases, and the punishments meted out to the convicted, demonstrate the changes in methods of punishment in the area over time. Through a study of cases heard at the Gloucestershire Assizes, a lot can be learned about attitudes towards crime and punishment both in the area and at a national level, and how they gradually changed over time.

This book aims to provide an insight into the punishments given to people in the Cotswolds (particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), bring to life some of the people who were punished, and show what kind of society they lived in.

Nell Darby, 2011

Notes

1Gloucester Journal, 31 March 1752

2Gloucester Journal, 11 August 1730

1

BURNED AT THE STAKE

From our viewpoint, in the twenty-first century, we might view capital punishment of any kind with abhorrence, looking at the hangings of the past as a sign of an uncivilised British society - although some people would still prefer it if we had capital punishment. Yet up to the mid-eighteenth century, some crimes were deemed to be such an affront to the natural condition of society that they deserved to be punished with a death worse than hanging. Hanging, after all, could – if you were lucky – result in a quick death from a dislocated or broken neck; even if you were unlucky, strangulation from the rope might only take minutes.

So for crimes regarded as being petty treason – such as a woman murdering her husband, viewed as an unnatural state of affairs, for the wife should be subservient to her spouse – a different form of death was used. The guilty would be burned to death.

This sentence was also used in Britain as a punishment for heretics, those seen to be against the established order, and the Cotswolds had a long association with the punishment. In the sixteenth century, the Bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper, was martyred by being burned at the stake. Possibly raised in Oxfordshire, he had graduated from Oxford University in 1519 and after a varied career, became Bishop of Gloucester in 1550. A Protestant reformer, he caused controversy by rejecting the wearing of clerical vestments in the Church of England, thus violating the 1549 Act of Uniformity. His radical views made him a marked man. He was initially imprisoned on the charge of owing the Crown money and was deprived of his bishopric. He was eventually executed at Gloucester on 9 February 1555, his death a drawn-out affair due to the faggots placed at the stake being made of green wood, and taking time to catch fire.1

Oxford, where John Hooper studied.

Within 200 years the punishment was being meted out to those guilty of less cerebral or religious crimes – domestic crimes committed by women, seen as more of an affront to society than those committed by men, were singled out for such a sentence.

For example, in March 1723, Jane Leamoucks, of Gloucester, was indicted for the murder of her husband James. It was alleged that she had stabbed him in the stomach with a knife on 12 October 1722. Several witnesses were called to give evidence at her trial, and said that they had often heard her threatening to kill James; another witness, John Harding, said further that she had admitted stabbing her husband and had asked Harding to hide the knife in her garden so that it wouldn’t be found. The court heard that she was a ‘person of a very bad character’ and found her guilty of wilful murder. On 1 April 1723, she was burned to death, probably near to her own house, at the scene of the crime. The Gloucester Journal reported that she denied committing the murder right up to her death, and ‘behaved herself very stubborn, from the time of her receiving sentence to the place of execution’.2

Thirty years later, on 14 April 1753, Ann Williams was burnt at the stake for poisoning her husband.3 The Newgate Calendar described her as being a ‘turbulent and dictatorial’ woman who ruled over her mild-mannered husband ‘with a rod of iron’.4 Mr Williams had grown used to letting his wife have her own way, and his subservient attitude caused her to regard him with contempt and dislike. Ann, subsumed by dislike for the man she was bound to in law, and cheating on him with another man, got her servant to buy some white mercury, and poisoned both her husband’s gruel and ale. He underwent a horrible death, in pain and constantly vomiting, accusing his wife on his deathbed of murdering him and calling Ann a ‘wicked woman’.

Given the nature of Mr Williams’ death, and the evidence for the purchase of the poison, Ann was found guilty of her husband’s murder and sentenced to death. Even up to the point that she was burnt, though – the sentence being carried out on 13 April 1753 - she continued to deny being responsible.5

Ann’s burning would have been carried out at Over, a small village just outside Gloucester. This was where the county’s gallows stood, until they were relocated to Gloucester Prison. She may have been taken from the prison to Over on a hurdle, before being chained to a wooden stake, around which would be heaped faggots. Although the sight of a woman burning to death sounds appalling to modern ears, Ann Williams’ punishment was witnessed by a crowd of onlookers. The only consolation for the squeamish is that many women were in fact strangled with a rope before being tied to the stake, out of a strange kind of sympathy for their sufferings, meaning that they were, in effect, hanged before being burned.

Burning continued to be the sentence for women convicted either of petty treason or high treason, which included coining offences. The last death by burning in Britain was, according to Richard Clark, in 1789,6 while Ann Williams’ was the last recorded case in Gloucestershire.

Subsequently, women convicted of killing their husbands were hanged for their crimes. Their offences may still have been seen as being unnatural acts for a woman to commit, but they were now punished in the same way as men. So Harriet Tarver, the young woman from Chipping Campden who was hanged on 9 April 1836 after poisoning her husband, had a far quicker death than Ann Williams – although she possibly had more lasting notoriety, a broadsheet ballad being composed and sold to mark the occasion of her execution. 7

Harriet Tarver poisoned her husband in Chipping Campden.

Notes

1‘John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester and Protestant Martyr’ from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13706

2Gloucester Journal, 1 April 1723, accessed via http://genebug.net/glsinquests.htm.

3Gloucester Journal, 17 April 1753, via http://genebug.net/glsinquests.htm

4The Newgate Calendar, accessed via http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng432.htm

5The Newgate Calendar, http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng432.htm

6Capital Punishment UK, accessed via http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/burning.htm

7Nell Darby (2009) pp 118-125

2

HANGED IN CHAINS

Hanging, as the ultimate punishment for criminals, has existed in England since Anglo-Saxon times, and wasn’t outlawed until 1964. Within this broad expanse of time, methods of hanging have changed; additional humiliations have been added to the punishment, such as hanging in chains or in a cage, being drawn and quartered afterwards, or bodies being left on show to the public until they rotted; but the mode of death has remained the same.

People from all classes have been hanged; when the authorities wanted to make a public example of those deemed to have committed extraordinarily bad crimes, they would give them the additional punishment of being hanged in chains, known as gibbeting. One notorious case in the Cotswolds came in 1549, when vicar Henry Joyce was hanged in chains from the tower of his church, St Mary’s in Chipping Norton, as a punishment for taking part in the Oxfordshire Rising, a protest against the introduction of the New English Prayer Book.1

Our nineteenth-century ancestors were famously fascinated and repelled in equal measure when it came to public executions. Crowds would gather in advance of the hangings of notorious criminals, with entrepreneurial landowners close to scaffold sites erecting seats for spectators, memorabilia being produced and sold, broadsheet ballads purporting to represent the chain of events, and the criminal’s final words being composed and sold before the said criminal had had the chance to utter any such final words. Charles Dickens attended executions and was left repelled by the public reaction; but the disquiet he felt was not shared by the majority of those attending an execution for a day out.

St Mary’s Church, Chipping Norton, where a former vicar was hung in chains.

Public hangings were eventually replaced by private affairs that took place within the confines of the prison walls in 1868, ending a centuries-old tradition of public humiliation. The last public hanging in Gloucestershire took place four years earlier, in 1864, when Lewis Gough was hanged at Gloucester Prison for murdering Mary Curtis;2 the first private hanging there wasn’t until 1872, when Frederick Jones, aged twenty, was hanged for killing his girlfriend, Emily Gardner in Cheltenham.3

But the public execution of criminals had another purpose aside from making the criminal recognise the enormity of his or her crime. It was intended that members of the public watching someone else undergo an awful death would be deterred from committing crimes themselves, aware of what fate might befall them if they did. Whether it had this effect is debatable, but the public certainly attended executions in great numbers. Gibbeting was also intended to deter others – by hanging criminals in public places and leaving their bodies to rot in front of passers-by.

When a simple man named Eli Hatton was sentenced to hang in chains in Mitcheldean, at the other end of Gloucestershire, on 4 September 1732, after smashing the head of a widowed carpenter with an axe, some 10,000 people were estimated to have watched his execution. He was pushed off a ladder whilst tied to a tree at Meane Hill, near Mitcheldean, and while denying the murder to the end, confessed to being a ‘great Sabbath breaker’ and being ‘addicted to whoring’. This was, though, according to the local paper’s report, which printed a full and detailed account of his death, whilst mentioning that he needed to confess his varied other sins because they ‘gave his conscience the greatest uneasiness’.4 One wonders whether the illiterate man said all this as he was about to die, or whether the newspaper was attempting to meet a public service remit by warning its readers of the dangers of breaking the Sabbath. Its account of Eli Hatton’s death was reminiscent of the broadsheet ballads published after executions, which stressed the importance of morality whilst going into salacious detail about criminal acts.

Another case where the Cotswold public flocked to see justice done – or just to watch men shudder in the hangman’s noose, depending on your point of view – was the hanging of Thomas Cambrey on 24 March 1744 at Bowling Green, Cirencester. I have written more fully about the case elsewhere,5 but Cambrey, who had been convicted of murdering Anne Millington after a house robbery went wrong, was hanged in chains near the Millington house, and the Gloucester Journal reported that ‘there was the greatest number of people ever seen on such an occasion’, which also saw spectators attempting to argue with the condemned man about what he had or hadn’t done.6

The Stow-on-the-Wold petty sessions, usually held at the Unicorn Inn, attracted the attention of local residents keen to hear what had been going on, who was involved, and how they would be punished. According to Joan Johnson, in her history of the town, when cases were referred from the Justice of the Peace at the petty sessions to the county assizes at Gloucester, ‘crowds of people’ would walk from Stow to Gloucester to wait for convictions and watch the executions that might subsequently take place. Walking nearly 30 miles to see an execution, and then walking the same distance back, sounds more like a big excursion for some entertainment than a desire to learn from others’ mistakes.7

The Unicorn Hotel – formerly Inn – in Stow-on-the-Wold.

Up until the early nineteenth century, one of the main ways in which society punished murderers was by hanging these criminals in chains, on a gibbet, often erected close to the scene of their crime, or close to major roads or crossroads, both to link their crime with their death, and to show their fate to the maximum number of passers-by. Eli Hatton’s body, for example, was left hanging on the gibbet for two months after his execution, and, after the gibbet was finally removed in November 1732, the murderer’s body was left in a heap on the ground, unburied.8