Tyburn E-Book

Alan Brooke

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

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Tyburn is synonymous with the idea of execution. The authors tell the story of how Tyburn came to be the place of execution and of the rituals and spectacle associated with the deaths of many people. They provide a vivid picture of crime and punishment in London, mixing martyrs, pickpockets, traitors and errant aristocrats.

Leseprobe

TYBURN

TYBURN

LONDON’S FATAL TREE

ALAN BROOKE & DAVID BRANDON

First published in 2004

Paperback edition first published in 2005

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Alan Brooke and David Brandon, 2005, 2013

The right of Alan Brooke and David Brandon to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, 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 7524 9579 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  Tyburn: River, Resort of Bawds and Place of Death

2  The King’s Gallows: Death at Tyburn in the Middle Ages

3  Tyburn in Tudor Times: Victims of Religious Persecution and Others

4  Religion, Civil War and Restoration: Tyburn in the Seventeenth Century

5  Changing Methods of Punishment: 1500 to 1800

6  Tyburn from the Restoration to 1700

7  London Street Life in the Eighteenth Century

8  Some Victims of Tyburn in the Eighteenth Century

9  Newgate to Tyburn in the Eighteenth Century

10  Some Hangmen of Tyburn

11  The Lore of the Tyburn Crowd

12  Newgate to Tyburn Today

Appendix: Tyburn in Literature

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

A book that covers some six centuries of history is inevitably indebted to the research of other historians, especially those working in the history of crime and the history of London. Of the many libraries and archives the authors have used, particular thanks go to the staff of the Guildhall Library in London for their courtesy and helpfulness.

We record our gratitude to Christopher Feeney of Sutton Publishing for his constructive advice as well as his diligent and scrupulous reading of the draft.

Friends and relations have given moral support and encouragement throughout and our heartfelt thanks goes to them.

Alan Brooke and David BrandonPeterborough, 2003

Introduction

The name ‘Tyburn’ is synonymous with the idea of public execution. It was one of London’s major places of execution from the twelfth century until 1783. A review of those who died there and of the crimes they committed as well as an examination of Tyburn’s place in popular culture provides valuable and entertaining insights into the economic, social and political changes that took place in London and elsewhere in Britain during this period.

Among those who met their Maker at Tyburn were possibly William Wallace, the Scottish patriot; Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne who claimed to be one of the princes supposedly murdered in the Tower; Claude Duval, almost the prototype for the myth of the handsome, dashing and courteous highwayman; Jack Sheppard who kept escaping from the dreaded Newgate Prison and the hated Jonathan Wild, perhaps London’s first master criminal. Most of those who died at Tyburn had been hauled through the streets from Newgate in the City and the road from there to Tyburn brought the two locations together in a grisly symbiosis.

Many martyrs for their religious beliefs died at Tyburn, and memorials to some of them can still be seen nearby. In 1661 the corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, execrated as regicides, were exhumed, transported to Tyburn, hanged and then beheaded, whereupon the bodies were thrown into a pit adjacent to the gallows. The outcome of this extraordinary event has provided one of history’s perennial teasers – the question of what has happened to Cromwell’s head.

Over the centuries, dozens of executioners practised their art at Tyburn. One of the best known, although by no means the most competent, Jack Ketch, went on to provide a generic name for all public executioners. Who were these men? What skills did they require? How did the technology of hanging change over the years?

The journey of the condemned felons from Newgate to Tyburn provided free and popular entertainment for London’s masses and it became highly ritualised, particularly in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prisoners stopped off at wayside inns as they passed through cheering crowds or, if their offences and their demeanour angered the spectators, they had to run the gauntlet of a hail of verbal and physical abuse. They were expected to show fortitude and the watching crowds warmed to the felon who made a valedictory speech in which he cursed the fates or, even better, those who had brought him to this sorry pass.

The hangman expected his perks from selling the rope and the clothes of the deceased while the physically afflicted in the crowd pressed forward to touch these because it was widely believed that they had curative properties. In later years, fights occasionally broke out as the relatives of the deceased fought those who wanted to take the body away for dissection. The vendors of the felon’s so-called ‘dying confessions’ hawked their wares among the crowd, as did a multitude of prostitutes. Pickpockets enjoyed rich takings. The wealthy hired expensive grandstand seats to obtain the best views at Tyburn Fair. All this etched itself deeply into the popular culture of London.

Before the 1960s, crime and the culture of the masses were subjects largely ignored by historians. Sensationalised, anecdotal writing about crime and punishment, the activities of individual criminals and the underworld of criminality had long been popular and had created popular preconceptions and prejudices. Dashing highwaymen carried out audacious robberies on Hounslow Heath, Jonathan Wild featured as the first ‘Napoleon of Crime’ and the escapades of Jack Sheppard appeared in innumerable ‘penny dreadfuls’. Vast crowds gleefully watched the death agonies of notorious miscreants at Tyburn, Execution Dock and other hanging places. Children were transported for stealing worthless trifles. This kind of writing, although entertaining, provided little real understanding of the nature of crime. From the 1960s, however, historians have turned their attention to popular culture, the behaviour of crowds, the causes and nature of criminal activity and the evolution of the country’s judicial and penal systems. The result is a far greater understanding of the dynamic relationship and interaction between crime and wider social, economic and political factors.

Many historians have concentrated their efforts on the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have related changing levels and types of crime to the severe tensions evident in a society going through the uneasy transformation from a rural and predominantly agricultural base to a largely industrial and urban one. The authors wish to contribute to this ongoing process of historiography by focusing on one particular locality famous in the popular culture of London. There is little recently published material on Tyburn and its associations and this book, aimed at the general reader, is intended to make a modest addition to the social and cultural history of crime and punishment, the history of London and the history of Tyburn in particular.

The use of Tyburn as a place of execution goes back to at least the last decade of the twelfth century. Tyburn was located well to the west of the City of London and hence the phrase ‘go west’ emerged in Elizabethan times, ironic reference to the direction most often taken by those condemned prisoners despatched for execution from the Tower, Newgate or elsewhere. On execution days, bells rang in City churches and large crowds turned out to witness the processions to Tyburn. A sense of holiday, of carnival, developed around the procession to Tyburn and the events at the gallows.

The sight of the felon publicly expiring, convulsed with terror and agony, was intended to be a frightful lesson to those who watched. Contemporary accounts leave little doubt that large numbers of people thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of a public execution. They could be extremely angry when a last-minute reprieve deprived them of their anticipated pleasure. Few hangmen attempted to despatch their victims as quickly and humanely as possible and indeed some were shamefully inept. The sight of a felon dying on the gallows was not an edifying one but it provided a popular form of public entertainment, the appeal of which transcended social class. There is little evidence that the crowds who gathered at Tyburn saw what was enacted there as a deterrent to the carrying out of serious crime.

Hangings took place eight times a year at Tyburn until 1783 and eight times a year after that outside Newgate gaol. Those who died at Tyburn had mostly committed their offences in Middlesex and the City of London. While many felons who died at Tyburn had trades and were printers, whip-makers or drapers, for example, and some were from the ranks of the well-to-do, large numbers were from the poorest and most debased sections of society, trapped in a hopeless cycle of poverty and despair. The majority had committed property crimes. Many who made up Tyburn’s gory harvest were adopted Londoners, often young, who had migrated to the capital in search of wealth and fame, only to find neither.

Hanging played a key role in the maintenance of authority in England from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and yet it became central to popular culture. It was made the subject of innumerable jokes, ballads and satires. The heroic progress of some felons to Tyburn was nothing less than a parody. It was a ritual mocking of an occasion intended by the authorities to display the awful omnipotence of the law. It therefore undermined the authorities themselves. Ridicule, gallows humour, nonchalance, abuse of the hangman or the Ordinary, the priest who accompanied the condemned felons – all these had the effect of making the event the very opposite of what the authorities intended.

Most condemned felons wanted to die well, given the very public forum in which they would do so. Many used the occasion to make speeches. Sometimes they were cringing confessions or hopeless protestations of contrition or innocence. These cut little ice with the crowd, whereas those felons who used the occasion to denounce and defy the authorities or to spin a salacious yarn or quip with the crowd usually aroused an enthusiastic response. Legend has little to say of the felons – and they were probably the majority – who went to their deaths publicly evacuating their bladders and bowels through abject terror. For all those who underwent the ordeal with their chins up, the majority had to be physically supported into the cart at Newgate or from it to the scaffold at Tyburn. As V.A.C. Gatrell says, ‘most of those hanged were far from the swashbucklers of legend and could not behave like heroes if they tried. They were of such obscurity, their crimes so common, their deaths so humdrum, that their executions failed to earn a broadside, a ballad, or a notice in the newspapers’ (Gatrell 1994: 40).

It is impossible to give a definitive figure for the numbers of those who were executed at Tyburn. Alfred Marks states that the gallows received the condemned from the courts of Westminster and the Guildhall but its main suppliers were the Middlesex and the Old Bailey Sessions. Marks bases his estimate for executions at Tyburn on the figures supplied by the work of John Cordy Jeaffreson from the Middlesex County Records (four volumes; 1897–1902). Between 1609 and 1618 there were 714 people executed in Middlesex. Marks assumes that felonies committed in the City must have been greater in number and therefore proffers a combined figure for the same period of approximately 1,408. From this he goes on to give an estimate for the number of deaths at Tyburn during the reign of Elizabeth I and comes up with a figure of over 9,000. Clearly there is a great deal of guesswork involved but Marks is bold enough to suggest that over the 600 hundred years of Tyburn’s history as a place of execution, at least 50,000 died there. This makes a yearly average of around eighty. Others have put the figure much higher but with even less hard evidence.

Any discussion of Tyburn taps into a rich and fascinating diversity of history. This book will outline some of the associations of the Tyburn area from medieval times to 1783 when hangings ceased at this location. It also traces related themes such as the way in which the penal system changed over time and the role played by the crowd in the rituals of execution. It briefly surveys other hanging places in London and gives descriptions of some of the hangmen who officiated at Tyburn. There are examples of Tyburn featuring in literature and an attempt is made to reconstruct what a condemned prisoner travelling from Newgate to Tyburn would have seen and sensed at about the middle of the eighteenth century. To encourage a feeling for history in the field, the route to Tyburn is described as it may be followed at the present time with aspects of its topography, buildings and rich, varied historical connections.

ONE

Tyburn: River, Resort of Bawds and Place of Death

London is clustered in the valley and along the flood plain of the River Thames as it approaches the sea. Both to the north and south of London there is high land where sands and gravels are superimposed on the clays which underlie the metropolis. To the north, flowing off these heights, which are very evident in the Highgate and Hampstead areas, are a number of streams which form tributaries of the Thames. Probably the best known of these are the Westbourne, the Fleet and the Tyburn.

‘Tyburn’ is a word of Saxon origins and its first mention is probably in the forged Charter of King Edgar (951) where it is written as ‘Teo-burna’. ‘Burna’ and its derivations are frequently found in English place names and they mean stream, bourne or brook. It is possible that the ‘ty’ part of the name indicates the union of two streams or a division into two branches enclosing an area of dry land. Another explanation is that the Tyburn was associated with the Saxons and the Germanic god Tiw who gave his name to Tuesday. If this latter explanation has any validity then this is ironic because Tiw was the god of law. Another explanation is that the name was originally ‘Teoburna’ meaning ‘boundary stream’.

The Tyburn is a small stream, the main source of which is a spring in the Lyndhurst Road area of Hampstead, once known as ‘Shepherdswell’. The water was appreciated for its clarity and was collected and sold by the bucket. The Tyburn runs almost due south close to Fitzjohns Avenue, behind the Hampstead Theatre, under Adelaide Road and past Swiss Cottage, after which it is joined at Woronzow Road by a small tributary. Woronzow Road owes its strange name to Count Simon Woronzow who came to Britain as Russian Ambassador in the eighteenth century and liked it so much that he settled in Marylebone and never went back home.

The tributary rises close to Hampstead Town Hall, flows through the Belsize Park district and skirts the western side of Primrose Hill. The combined stream crosses the Regent’s Canal branch of the Grand Union Canal in a cast-iron pipe aqueduct. It skirts Regents Park where it picks up a very small tributary rising under London Zoo and it then runs under Gloucester Place. The various com-ponents of the Tyburn once flowed through meadowland, at least as far as Swiss Cottage. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, they had largely disappeared under bricks and mortar. South of Swiss Cottage it is likely that the stream was conduited and in use as a sewer as early as the 1670s.

The Tyburn is shown in a map by William Faden, dated 1785, sweeping first west and then eastwards to the stables of the Horse Guards near the Baker Street Bazaar. It flows under Marylebone Road and just west of Marylebone High Street, the bends of the northern end of which still provide evidence of the course of the invisible stream. Aybrook Street nearby takes its name from the Aye Brook which was an alternative medieval name for the Tyburn. It crossed Marylebone Lane twice. As it approaches Oxford Street the small valley the Tyburn has created is still visible. It runs under Oxford Street near what is now Stratford Place, close to Bond Street Underground station. Maps by Morden and Lea, dated respectively 1690 and 1700, show what is now Oxford Street crossing a nameless stream on a bridge at this point. Later editions show this stream named the ‘Aye Brook ‘or ‘Tybourne’. This bridge, which became part of the turnpike from St Giles to Kilburn in the 1720s, was a constant source of acrimony between various local government bodies and the turnpike trustees.

The presence of the Tyburn proved a nuisance to the engineers building the Central Line or ‘Twopenny Tube’ in 1900 because water from it kept flooding into the workings. Further north, St Cyprian’s church in Glentworth Street, Marylebone, needed especially deep foundations because of the presence of the Tyburn close by. In 1875 workmen building a sewer in Stratford Place chanced on a structure made of stone which historians believe was erected in the first half of the thirteenth century and is possibly London’s earliest reservoir. It was built around 1240 to store water from the Tyburn which was then despatched through elm or lead pipes via the Great Conduit to Cheapside to provide a water supply for the City of London. The existence of this water supply enhanced the importance of the area and in the reign of Elizabeth I a Banqueting House was built over the great cisterns associated with the conduit. The New River took over the provision of the main water supplies for the City in 1609 but the Banqueting House continued to be used for the junketings of the City fathers until it was pulled down in the 1730s. Stratford House was later built on its site. North Audley Street is no great distance away and here workmen once unearthed a Roman bath which it is thought took its water supply from the Tyburn.

The Tyburn now makes its surreptitious way through Mayfair by Lower Brook Street, the name again recalling the presence of the stream, to the foot of Hay Hill, through Lansdowne Gardens, down Half Moon Street and under Piccadilly at what used to be called the Kingsbridge. Mayfair takes its name from the erstwhile fair that was held on what was once called Brook Fields. This fair had become so disorderly, attracting belligerent, drunken crowds, mountebanks and confidence tricksters of all sorts and whores and pickpockets galore, that it was finally abolished in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Tyburn then dips quite sharply through Green Park, heading in the direction of Buckingham Palace. The Tyburn’s subterranean presence may have been responsible for the mist that was once a feature on damp autumnal nights in the Green Park area.

From this point the rest of the Tyburn’s course is disputed. Three main possibilities have been identified. One is that it approached Buckingham Palace from whence it went underground and pursued a course down what are now St James Street, Orchard Street and College Street and then alongside the walls of Westminster Abbey and into the Thames. The second variation claims that the Tyburn divided when it got to the Westminster area and its two courses created Thornea Island on which the Abbey stands. The third is that from the present site of Buckingham Palace, the Tyburn turned west and forming the ancient boundary of the City of Westminster, flowed close to Tachbrook Street, across what are now Vauxhall Bridge Road and Grosvenor Road, and into the Thames in the Pimlico area. To add to the confusion surrounding the Tyburn, there is also a Tyburn Brook, a very small stream rising near Marble Arch and flowing into the Westbourne which forms part of the Serpentine at that point.

There is a story that Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) was rowed up the Tyburn in the Royal Barge as far as Brook Street and indeed traces of a mooring place were found in the vicinity during building works in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is recorded that the Tyburn once provided excellent sport for anglers.

Tyburn or ‘Tybourne’ is mentioned in Domesday Book and was the name originally given to the area now known as Marylebone. Only in later times did the usage of the name Tyburn evolve so that it applied just to the vicinity of the gallows. The original Tyburn district possessed a small church dedicated to St John the Baptist near the present Oxford Street and was built in 1200. It was in a lonely, low-lying and watery spot not far from where hangings were already taking place. By 1400 this church had become ruinous and the neighbourhood notorious for robberies. It was replaced but a further church was built around 1740 and this was known as St Mary’s-of-the-Bourne or by-the-Bourne which is probably how ‘Marylebone’ evolved. St Mary’s church became inadequate as the population of the area grew rapidly. After some delay a new church was opened in 1817 close to the present Oldbury Place and Marylebone Road. The Tyburn flows nearby and the bend at the north end of Marylebone High Street indicates its approximate course. The earlier St Mary’s was demoted to the status of ‘Parish Chapel’ and demolished in 1949. As late as 1720, the area north-east of the gallows remained well wooded and largely rural. Several monarchs, including Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, are said to have enjoyed the thrill of the hunt in the area. What is now Marylebone High Street contained scattered rural hovels, some of them thatched and picturesquely decorated with climbing roses. This rustic idyll was about to change for ever.

In 1710 the manor of Marylebone was bought by the Duke of Newcastle whose only daughter married Edward Harley. In 1711 Harley was created Earl of Oxford, from whom the names of Harley Street and Oxford Street are derived. He embarked on large-scale quality housing development which meant that the old manor of Marylebone had 577 houses in 1739 and 2,600 in 1795.

After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, many Huguenot refugees settled in the area around Marylebone and they opened a ‘French Chapel’ close to Marylebone Lane. This is depicted in Hogarth’s engraving ‘Noon’, the second of his engravings in the series The Four Times of the Day, published in 1738 and caricaturing French manners and customs. A pleasure ground known as the French Garden opened up in an area now covered by Devonshire Place, Beaumont Place and Devonshire Street. At first used largely for the playing of bowls, by the 1740s these grounds had become known as Marylebone Gardens, providing firework displays, fashionable social events and an assembly hall doubling as a theatre. The music in these gardens was at one time under the direction of Dr Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78) who composed ‘Rule, Britannia’. New works produced by Handel in his later days often had their first British performance at Marylebone. The criminal fraternity is always attracted to places where the rich assemble. Pickpockets, footpads and highwaymen flocked to the area. Many of the drunken revellers were easy game as they left the gardens and wandered home befuddled. So common were the attacks on its patrons that the manager of the gardens was forced to provide mounted guards to escort patrons to their homes. The history of pleasure gardens in London is one of decline from the initially smart and ultra-fashionable through the raffish to the simply tawdry and disreputable. So it was with Marylebone Gardens. Its owner gave up the unequal struggle in 1778 and closed the gardens down. By this time Marylebone was largely built over and the presence of the gardens had helped to give the area a notoriously bawdy and boisterous character. It became renowned for cock-fighting, bear-baiting and prize-fighting. A number of pubs such as the Queen’s Head and Artichoke, the Yorkshire Stingo and the Farthing Pie House were all located close to the Tyburn and helped to give the area a reputation for drunkenness, violence and general debauchery.

‘Tyburn’ or Marylebone is rich in historical associations. Lord Byron was baptised in the parish church and Horatia Nelson’s name can be found in the parish register. Interestingly, her entry is the only one which does not show the parents’ occupations. Dr Johnson at one time resided at 38 Castle Street and Mrs Thrale, later Mrs Piozzi, with whom he was well acquainted, lived at 33 Welbeck Street. His biographer, James Boswell, lived not far away at 122 Great Portland Street and doubtless found much to please him in the raffish character of the place. Charles Dickens resided at 1 Devonshire Place. Many great artists lived in the district, including J.M.W. Turner, George Romney, John Flaxman and Sir Edwin Landseer. Captain Edward Marryat, author of Mr Midshipman Easy, was a resident as was Charles Wesley, the poet, Methodist and father of hymnology. He once preached an open-air sermon at York Gate, near the north end of Marylebone High Street and next to the Tyburn. He is buried in the yard of the old St Marylebone Church where his illustrious neighbours include George Stubbs, well known for his paintings of horses and other livestock.

What of the area around the notorious ‘fatal tree’ where so many wretches met their deaths over the centuries? There is considerable doubt about the exact site or sites of the gallows at Tyburn. It is possible that Tyburn was first used as a place of execution in 1196. In 1222, Henry III ordered the erection of two gibbets for the purpose of hanging thieves and malefactors in the place where the gallows were formerly situated – ‘The Elms’. ‘The King ordered two permanent gallows to be built on the basis that there were no more suitable trees’ (Barker 1970: 45). In 1393 a ‘Tyburn Gallows’ in the parish of Paddington is mentioned. In 1478 the site of the gallows is given as being in the Manor of Hide. Two fields are mentioned with the names of ‘Galowmede’ and ‘Galowfield’. These were close to where Marble Arch now stands and suggest a place of execution.

The earliest identification in graphic form of Tyburn as a site for executions seems to be the map which appears in the first edition of Camden’s Britannia dating from 1607. This shows the gallows situated at the junction of the present Edgware Road, Oxford Street and Bayswater Road. One suggestion is that in much earlier times there was a gallows close to Stratford Place and adjacent to where the Tyburn crossed Tyburn Road, later Oxford Street. The Tyburn River formed the west boundary of the old ‘Tyburn’ or ‘Marylebone’ district. It may be that the gallows moved from here some time late in the fourteenth century but that when it was re-erected somewhat to the west, the old name Tyburn stuck. The issue is made more confusing by the fact that there was a district sometimes called Tyburnia which approximates with Bayswater and from which a small stream called the Tyburn Brook emerged to flow south to join the Westbourne and thence to make its way through to the Thames.

The gallows are depicted in a number of illustrations from the seventeenth century and these allow a picture to be built up of the site and its immediate surroundings while making due allowance for artistic licence. An illustration of 1680 shows preparations being made for an execution. A pair of ladders is propped against the gallows, on the top of which are three men who have been getting the rope ready. The condemned man stands in a horse-drawn cart beneath the gallows with the rope around his neck. The prison Ordinary or chaplain, also standing in the cart, reads prayers to the prisoner. A man stands by the head of the horse ready for the command to pull the horse away and leave the prisoner suspended. There is another horse and cart waiting in the foreground which contains a coffin ready to receive the body. In the distance stands a large crowd.

Despite the expansion of London, particularly to the west of the City, Tyburn’s rural location can still be seen depicted, as it appeared at the time of the last execution in 1783, by the Norwich-born artist William Capon. The scene looks towards Hyde Park from the last house in Upper Seymour Place. In the forefront on the right-hand side is a wooden viewing gallery from which spectators could get a grandstand view of the executions. Over twenty years later Capon reworked this sketch into a watercolour which emphasised Tyburn’s earlier rural nature. It gives a very strong sense of a location well beyond the urban sprawl. Interestingly, Capon’s painting does not show the gallery but there is a shadow cast in the right foreground where the gallery had been on his original drawing.

Even if the exact spot where the first executions took place cannot be identified, there remains the question of why the Tyburn district was chosen in the first place. The answer probably lies with its rural location. Tyburn had gibbets as well as the gallows. It was the practice to display the remains of certain criminals in gibbets or open cages after they had been executed and removed from the gallows. They were intended to act as a mute warning to the living of the wages of sin. At times there would have been an accumulation of dead bodies poisoning the air and while viewing the bodies may have been a popular diversion, no one wanted to live too close to the stench that would have been created (Marks 1908: 62). At Tyburn, at least until the eighteenth century, the sight and smell of these corpses were some distance from major human habitation. However, London was no stranger to smells or the poisoning of the air. Noxious aromas emanated from breweries, slaughterhouses, dung-heaps, vinegar works and other commercial premises and from waste and refuse piled in the streets or thrown unceremoniously into open watercourses.

Other explanations of the origin of Tyburn’s location suggest that the prominent group of elms growing in the area would have been used regularly for executions before the later invention of the gallows (Baker, 1989: 190). It may also have been significant that they were located at, or close to, a crossroads. In many cultures, crossroads have been seen as a place of supernatural significance symbolising a portal, gate or door providing a transition from this life to the next. Additionally, crossroads have often been thought of as the meeting places of witches or demons. It is probably no coincidence that in Christian countries, crosses and statues of saints or other objects of reverence were often established at crossroads.

For the ancient Greeks the elm was a symbol of death and for the Normans it was the tree of justice. An early name given to Tyburn was ‘The Elms’ but this is not particularly illuminating because there were other locations known by the same name including Smithfield, the precincts of Westminster (Dean’s Yard) and the abbey lands at Covent Garden. Was ‘The Elms’ a generic name for places of execution? Particular confusion surrounds Tyburn and Smithfield, which were both places where executions took place from early times. For example, different accounts claim Tyburn and Smithfield as the places which witnessed the deaths of both FitzOsbert in 1196 and William Wallace in 1305.

An iron plaque is set in the pavement opposite the end of Edgware Road about 50 yards west of Marble Arch, claiming to mark the spot where the gallows stood. Exactitude, however, is probably unachievable, because the claims of 49 Connaught Square are advanced as also are those of the junction of Edgware Road and Bryanston Street, both sites being a little to the north of Marble Arch. It may well be that the site changed from time to time. In 1759 a movable gallows was erected as and when needed, the site of the old triangular gallows being required for the toll house built to serve the new turnpike. Although the toll house was demolished in 1829, its site is shown on old maps and should provide a pretty exact location for the ‘Triangular Tree’.

When the turnpike was removed the site of the gate was recorded in a monument on the south side of the road, somewhat to the east of Marble Arch. It consisted of a slab of cast iron with a gable top bearing on both sides the legend ‘Here stood Tyburn Gate 1829’, this being the year in which Tyburn Turnpike was abolished. This monument made no pretence at showing the position of the gallows and itself succumbed to road improvement works early in the twentieth century.

Today, standing among the fumes and the constant roar of the traffic around Marble Arch, it takes a considerable effort of the imagination to bring to the mind’s eye the vast crowds, many of them drunken revellers, for whom Tyburn Fair provided a free, regular and welcome diversion from the everyday tedium of life in the metropolis.

TWO

The King’s Gallows: Death at Tyburn in the Middle Ages

It is difficult to establish whether any executions took place at Tyburn before 1196. Capital punishment is said to have been abolished by William I but reinstated under Henry I (r. 1100–35) so it is possibly during that time that the first executions were staged at Tyburn. Records of criminal activity and punishment are sparse but certainly in 1177 in the reign of Henry II a large gang of rich and well-connected young men carried out a series of attacks and robberies on private houses. One of the gang was John Senex, a Londoner who was caught and possibly executed at Tyburn.

William FitzOsbert, also known as ‘Longbeard’, is frequently identified as the first person to be hanged at Tyburn, the year being 1196 and his crime sedition, but Smithfield is also claimed as his place of execution (Richardson 2000: 23; Ackroyd 2000: 57). FitzOsbert led a revolt of merchants and artisans against taxes resulting from the ransom paid for the retrieval of Richard I. On his return from the Crusades in 1193, Richard had been captured on his way through Austria by Duke Leopold who, clearly a shrewd businessman, sold him to the Emperor, Henry VI. Ransom was set at 150,000 marks and the burden of paying this fell largely on better-off Londoners. They got poor value for money for Richard only briefly touched English shores before hastening off abroad once more in an attempt to consolidate his continental possessions. He never returned. FitzOsbert’s insurrection was quickly and ruthlessly put down and William was seized in the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside where he and some of his supporters had taken refuge. The accounts of FitzOsbert differ according to the prejudices of the chronicler. Matthew Paris views him with some sympathy calling him the ‘defender of the poor against the royal extortioners’. William of Newburgh, however, claims that FitzOsbert’s motives were base.

The dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diceto, and Gervase of Canterbury both offer contemporary accounts of FitzOsbert’s execution. Gervase states that FitzOsbert was suspended by his feet from the neck of a horse, where he ‘was drawn from the aforesaid Tower through the City to the Elms … bound by a chain … he was hanged in company with his associates and perished’. Gervase does not mention Tyburn but refers to the Elms which might have been Smithfield and this clearly confuses the issue of the location of this execution. However, Ralph of Diceto comments that FitzOsbert, ‘his hands bound behind him, his feet tied with long cords, [was] drawn by means of a horse through the midst of the City to the gallows near Tyburn [where] he was hanged’ (Gomme 1909: 5): a clear reference to Tyburn by a contemporary writer.

Another source of confusion between the Elms at Tyburn and those at Smithfield concerns an execution that took place in 1222. Two different accounts record a civil disturbance in London. One states that it resulted from a wrestling match that got out of hand and led to an armed confrontation between the citizens of Westminster and those of the City. The other suggests that there were strong disagreements over the succession to the throne of Henry III. At that time, London and much of south-east England was in the hands of the French Dauphin, Louis, while much of the north was controlled by rebellious barons. One of the Dauphin’s supporters, Constantine FitzAthulf, who had been a sheriff of London in 1197, caused a riot at a tournament when he proclaimed his allegiance to Louis. FitzAthulf was subsequently executed at the Elms. It is not clear whether this refers to Smithfield or Tyburn. We know that FitzAthulf was sent by water to his place of execution, which was not an uncommon practice when there was a fear of popular intervention. A condemned person could be taken to Tyburn by water from Westminster or the Horseferry, or to the vicinity of Smithfield via the Fleet River. Knowing that Henry III ordered the sheriff of Middlesex to build two good gibbets at Tyburn, the royal gallows, it could be that Tyburn has a strong claim to be the place of FitzAthulf’s death. These were to replace older and presumably decaying ones, which suggests that punishment and execution were well established at Tyburn by that time.

The punishment of drawing the condemned on a hurdle pulled by horses to the place of execution, hanging the prisoner and taking him down before death, disembowelling, beheading and then cutting into quarters, appears first to have been recorded for an execution in 1241. A later case in 1242 concerning William de Marisco, or William Marsh, highlights the brutality of this particular form of punishment which featured so largely in the history of Tyburn. Marsh, who was the son of Geoffrey, Justiciar of Ireland, was accused of murdering Henry Clement, a messenger sent by the Irish peers to the King. He was also accused of attempting to assassinate Henry III. Having protested his innocence, Marsh fled to Lundy Island off Bideford Bay where he resorted with other fugitives to robbery and piracy. Marsh and sixteen of his men were eventually captured and thrown into the Tower. Gregory’s Chronicle (Camden Society 1876: 65) records that ‘William Marche was drawe and hangyd at Tyburne.’ Marsh is depicted in a contemporary illustration being drawn by a horse from the Tower to Tyburn to suffer his punishment. He was hanged, disembowelled and then his bowels were burnt. His body was quartered and the parts were despatched for display in four provincial cities. Prior to his death, Marsh confessed his sins to a friar, John of St Giles, who told him to suffer his punishment with patience as a means of penance (Luard 1890: iv 193–6). It is not known whether Marsh found this advice helpful under such trying circumstances. The confessing of sins by the condemned was to take on a much more public, ritual and ideological significance during the period from the sixteenth century.

After the death of William Marsh, executions continued at Tyburn during the rest of the thirteenth century although records are not specific. It was towards the end of this century that the persecution and eventual expulsion of the Jews from England reached its height. The Jews had been subjected to the systematic seizure of their assets from the reign of Henry III and although they were by now largely impoverished, their presence was still resented by many. Almost three hundred Jews in London were sentenced to be hanged and drawn in the late thirteenth century and it is possible that some of these executions took place at Tyburn.

Punishments varied in the type and severity of the pain and humiliation they inflicted. In October 1295, Sir Thomas de Turberville, who may have been executed at Tyburn, was condemned to death for entering into treasonable communication with France as well as suggesting a French invasion in support of William Wallace, the Scottish patriot and hero. Before he was hanged, he was drawn to the gallows on a bull’s hide and attended by hangmen dressed as devils who taunted him all the way and hit him with cudgels.

The beginning of the fourteenth century witnessed the execution of William Wallace for his stand against the English. In August 1305 Wallace was brought to London after his capture and accused of treason. However, as he had never sworn allegiance to the English king he could not be justly accused of this particular offence. From the point of view of the English prosecutors this was a mere technicality. Nothing very definite is known about Wallace’s birth or early life and the same seems to be the case with regard to the place of his death. Many accounts state that he was executed at Smithfield but some suggest Tyburn. He was taken from the Tower through the City to ‘the Elms’ where he was hanged, beheaded and his various bodily parts burnt. In the case of Wallace’s execution it appears that the ritual included ‘abscisis genitalibus’ – cutting off the privy parts of the condemned (Marks 1908: 32). The execution of Wallace also established the gruesome precedent of displaying the heads of executed felons on the Drawbridge Gate of London Bridge, a practice that was to continue for at least 350 years. There is a memorial outside St Bartholomew’s Hospital which claims that Wallace was executed near that spot in Smithfield in 1305.

The year after Wallace’s execution two other Scottish leaders were brought to London. One of them was Simon Fraser. According to the chronicles, Fraser was drawn from the Tower through the streets to the gallows as a traitor, hanged as a thief and beheaded as a murderer (Luard iii: 134–5). His head was fixed on a pole alongside that of Wallace on London Bridge. Although there is no specific reference to Tyburn, it was claimed in a ballad that Fraser was taken from Cheapside to Tyburn wearing a garland on his head and fetters on his legs.

Although evidence for the period from the mid-fourteenth to the sixteenth century is somewhat patchy, Tyburn is known to have played its part in connection with some of the notable people and events of the time. Roger Mortimer, the exceptionally ambitious Earl of March, had become the lover of Queen Isabella and conspired with her to depose the weak Edward II. Although the King was indeed deposed and later horribly murdered, their efforts rebounded on them because they resulted in the accession to the throne of the young Edward III, a man of very different kidney from his father. He initiated a covert raid on Nottingham Castle in which Mortimer was seized and dragged off to London. He was placed in the Tower and then, according to John Stow, he was ‘drawne to the Elmes and there hanged on the common gallows’ (Stow 1605: 229–30). Other chronicles have stated that Mortimer was drawn from the Tower to the Elms about a league outside the City of London. The Grey Friars Chronicle, however, is more specific, stating that he was ‘Hangyd and drawne at Tyburn for tresoun’. Mortimer was left to hang for two days and two nights before being buried in Greyfriars Church.

Among the thousands executed at Tyburn throughout its long history there was a steady flow of those who had taken part in rebellions. An early threat to London came during the reign of Richard II. In 1377, at the age of ten, he succeeded Edward III. Within four years he was faced with a serious rebellion when peasants led by Wat Tyler took up arms in protest over the new poll tax, marched from Kent and Essex to storm the City and demanded to see the King. The revolt was suppressed but provided an excuse for taking reprisals against perceived dissenters. One such group were the Lollards, the name given to the followers of John Wycliffe. The Lollards were heretics active in England in the latter part of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. Believed to be England’s only native medieval heretical body, they originated in Oxford in the 1370s.

Tyburn as a place of execution came very much to be associated with the Lollards in the popular mind and somehow even the origins of its name were described by some as due to this association: ‘Tieburne, some will have it so called from Tie and Burne, because the poor Lollards for whom this instrument was first set up, had their necks tied to the beame, and their lower parts burnt in the fire’ (Clinch 1890: 67).

The troubled times of the reign of Richard II at the close of the fourteenth century had helped the spread of Lollard ideas. With the accession of the House of Lancaster in 1399 an attempt was made to reform and restore constitutional authority in Church and state. In 1401 the Act ‘De Haeretico Comburendo’ – on the burning of heretics – was introduced. This Act was directed against the Lollards, ‘who thought damnably of the sacraments and usurped the office of preaching’. Evidence shows that many Lollards were executed in London, particularly at Smithfield and places such as St Giles but few are definitely known to have died at Tyburn despite the claim mentioned above that Tyburn was erected precisely for the purpose of executing them.

There are many cases of people being drawn, hanged and quartered in London after Mortimer’s execution in 1330. Among these was Alderman Nicholas Brembre in 1388. He was an immensely ambitious man who had been a close adviser to Richard II, but, being prepared to stop at nothing to elevate his own position, found that he had made powerful enemies who were only too happy to bring him down and had few friends to support him. Detailed information on executions around this time is scanty but one definite case is that of a man who was murdered in his own home by an intruder who broke in for the purposes of theft. John Stow suggests that there was a miscarriage of justice as the murdered man’s wife was accused and burnt and three servants were executed for the crime at Tyburn. Only later, in 1391, was the actual intruder brought to justice and hanged.

Famine hit the City in 1391 and ill-feeling was exacerbated when rumours circulated about the King’s extravagant lifestyle. In 1399, in a climate of intense social unrest resulting from high taxes, John Hall was executed at Tyburn for being an accomplice to the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, the seventh and youngest son of Edward III, and one of a group of nobles who had opposed Richard II for some years. From 1397 these men were arrested, Gloucester himself being imprisoned in Calais. However, he died within weeks amid suspicion that he had been murdered. Now more rumours circulated to the effect that Richard had ordered four knights to kill Gloucester. Two years later Hall was arrested and charged as an accomplice to the murder of Gloucester, it being alleged that he had kept the door of Gloucester’s room open which allowed the knights to enter with ease and smother him. On 17 October 1399 Hall was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn where he was hanged, had his bowels burnt and was then quartered. His head was brought to the place where Gloucester had been murdered. Following Richard’s abdication in favour of Henry IV, the four knights were later arrested and executed at Cheapside. Ironically, Richard II was himself murdered shortly afterwards at Pontefract Castle on 14 February 1400.

After Richard’s death there were plots to overthrow his successor Henry IV. Seditious material attacking Henry was published and distributed, but in 1402 the King moved against the perpetrators, some of whom were arrested and eventually executed at Tyburn. Roger Clarendon, a knight and eight friars were ‘strangled at Tiborne and their [sic] put into execution’ (Halle 1809: 26). In addition, Walter de Baldocke, the prior of Launde in Leicestershire, and another friar were executed although it is unclear whether this happened at Tyburn.

Those who recorded executions during these times did not always make it clear exactly where these happened. Some records state no more than ‘executed in London’. For example, William Serle who had been a servant of Richard II spread the idea after 1400 that the King was still alive and additionally forged a seal in his name. Serle was recorded as having been ‘drawn from Pontefract through the chiefest Citties of England and put to death at London’. Gregory’s Chronicle, however, actually states that Serle was executed at Tyburn.

Despite the sparseness of sources relating to Tyburn during these centuries, those that are available give the impression that it is mostly men of rank who died there – women get scarcely a mention. In 1416, for example, there is a record that Benedict Wolman, custodian of the Marshalsea Prison, was executed at Tyburn, while in the 1420s Sir John Mortimer met a similar fate. He had been lodged in the Tower on a charge of treason and then attempted to escape, a crime deemed to be petty treason. He received a beating and was then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. If poor people were indeed executed at Tyburn, then the chroniclers clearly thought their deaths were not usually worth mentioning. A few who appear in the records are the thief Will Wawe hanged at Tyburn in 1427; William Goodgroom, a horse dealer in 1437; John David, an apprentice, executed in 1446; and John Scott, John Heath and John Kenington who went to their deaths for slandering the King and some of his council. Others of the commonalty who died at Tyburn are not even named. They included a locksmith executed in 1467 for robbery and four yeomen of the Crown hanged in 1483.

Tyburn witnessed the culmination of a remarkable case in the 1440s. Roger Bolingbroke, an astrologer and magician, along with Canon Thomas Southwell of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, were charged with treason for attempting to kill Henry VI by sorcery. The purpose of the plot, in which Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was also implicated, was to replace Henry as King with his uncle the Duke of Gloucester. It was alleged that on 25 July 1441, Bolingbroke ‘with all his instruments of necromancy’ worked his malevolent spell although it had clearly not achieved its aim. All the plotters were arrested and when undergoing questioning Bolingbroke blamed Eleanor for causing him to ‘labour in the sayd art’ of witchcraft and sorcery. Bolingbroke, Southwell and Eleanor were indicted for treason. Margery Gourdemaine was also accused of involvement. Margery, often known as the ‘Witch of Eye’, had been charged eleven years previously on suspicion of practising witchcraft and Eleanor was said to have used Margery’s services against the King. Margery was burnt as a witch at Smithfield in October 1441. Southwell perished in the Tower after prophesying that he would never die at the hand of the law. Eleanor, after performing a penance by walking barefoot through the streets of London carrying a lighted candle and dressed in a white sheet, was imprisoned for life. Bolingbroke was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn where he was hanged and quartered. (This strange case is reflected in Shakespeare’s Henry VI; see Appendix, p. 239.)

Events on the gallows were sometimes accompanied by elements of black humour and never more so than in the case in 1447 of five condemned men who had been brought to Tyburn and were being made ready for execution and subsequent dismemberment. They had just been stripped when, at the eleventh hour, a reprieve arrived. Now, the law stated that the hangman was entitled to the clothing of any prisoner. This practice, although bizarre to modern eyes, was a useful perk for the hangman because these items, often believed to have supernatural properties, could be sold for considerable sums. The reprieve notwithstanding, the hangman was utterly determined not to forego his perks and he refused to hand the clothes back to the prisoners who must have started feeling very chilly. What entertainment there must have been for the crowd that day as the hangman and the shivering, naked but reprieved prisoners stood on the gallows arguing vehemently about the clothes. While derisive shouts and ribald catcalls doubtless rang in the air as the men trudged home naked, they must have been only too glad of the reprieve and eager to put a distance between themselves and the Tyburn gallows.