PIRATE’S CHAINS. ( From the Thames. ) Hanging in Chains BY ALBERT HARTSHORNE, F.S.A. “No, no; let them hang, and their names rot, and their crimes live for ever against them” (Mercy to Greatheart: The Pilgrim’s Progress , Chapter iv.). New York THE CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 104 & 106 FOURTH AVENUE MDCCCXCIII [Pg iv] [Pg v]...

O f the twelve regular methods of proceeding in the courts of criminal jurisdiction in England, the last—that of execution—is the only one that is particularly treated of in the following pages. “Sus. per col.” has been, as it were, the only warrant; but in attempting to trace some items in a record that runs like a scarlet thread through the long course of events that constitutes history, it has not been possible, on the one hand, to avoid touching upon other modes and details of capital punish

Ashmolean Museum.—Eight separate portions of Irons found in various parts of Oxford. Some have cylindrical padlocks attached to them. Chester Museum.—A leg-piece. Doddington Hall, Lincoln.—Parts of Tommy Otter’s Irons. See p. 104 . Leicester Gaol.—Cook’s Irons. See p. 111 . Norwich Gaol.—Watson’s Irons. See p. 94 . Norwich Museum.—A Head-piece. Preston.—Irons. Rye, Court Hall.—Breeds’s Irons. See p. 66 . Illustrated . Skegness Museum.—Irons. Warrington Museum.—Miles’s Irons. See p. 85 . Illustra

T o rest at last in the ground, to be buried in the sepulchre of their fathers, was accounted by the Jews as the greatest honour and happiness, and throughout the Old Testament the expression for death is sleeping, implying lying tranquil and undisturbed. Thus David, Azariah, and Jotham “slept with their fathers, and were buried in the city of David”—“for so He giveth His beloved sleep.” [1] On the other hand, to die an unnatural or violent death, to be cast out of the grave like an abominable b

H ence , as we have seen, gradually arose, side by side with the capital punishment of hanging on the gallows in its simplicity—which may be almost said to be as old as the world itself—the custom of publicly exposing human bodies upon gibbets as warnings to others. We gather from the “Vocabulary of Archbishop Alfric,” of the tenth century, and from early illuminated MSS., that the gallows (galga) was the usual mode of capital punishment with the Anglo-Saxons. It can hardly be doubted that in ce

W hilst such horrors were going on in England we may be sure that the Germans, with their dogged brutality, were not behind-hand. With them the bodies of traitors and highwaymen, as well as of murderers, were fixed upon poles, set upon wheels, impaled alive, or hung upon gibbets. Three prints from “La Cosmographie Universelle de Münster,” 1552, give some notion of the sternness of the Teutonic penal code. DECAPITATION. ( Facsimile of an original woodcut in “La Cosmographie universelle de Münster

I n Spain the body remained usually upon the gallows after execution, the gallows thus becoming the gibbet. The following story is an exemplification of this practice:— “It was my fortune at St. Domingo to enter the Town-Church: accompanied with two French Puppies, mindful to shew me a miraculous matter. “Where, when come, I espied over my head, opposite to the great Altar, two milk-white Hens enravelled in an Iron Cage, on the inner-side of the Porches Promontore . And demanding why they were k

F rom the stony horrors of Paris, and the serio-grotesque doings of the Batavians, it will be a relief to turn to the imagery of the “Inspired Dreamer”:— “Now I saw in my dream, that they went on until they were come to the place that Simple, and Sloth, and Presumption, lay and slept in, when Christian went by on pilgrimage: and behold they were hanged up in irons, a little way off on the other side.” This was written between 1660 and 1670. It is to be observed that the expression is “irons,” an

I t will be recollected that one of the most interesting of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, “The Pirate,” is founded upon a case of piracy in the Orkneys, in 1725. [48] The captain, John Gow, and his crew, were secured, with much courage and address, by a patriotic inhabitant, James Fea, and the prisoners were prosecuted by the High Court of Admiralty. The remarkable part of this affair was that, on Gow “standing mute,” that is, refusing to plead, the judge ordered that he should be brought to the ba

B y 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 anatomi

I n 1752 Captain Lowry suffered at Execution Dock, and was hung in chains by the side of the Thames, doubtless for piracy; and in the same year John Swan was executed at Chelmsford and hung in chains in Epping Forest. In 1764 William Corbett was executed on Kennington Common. His body was “fixed in irons”—a new expression—and hung upon Gallery Wall, between Rotherhithe and Deptford. Eighteen years earlier the gal lant young rebel, Jemmy Dawson, had been hung, drawn, and quartered on the same com

F ew persons of taste have failed to make themselves acquainted with the works of Bewick, the father of English wood-engraving. In them we have everything the most truthful and poetical. Wide, wild moor, the desolation of winter, with the solitary worn-out horse, forgotten in the snowy waste; the falling fane, the crumbling tower; scenes on northern shores,—rocks and sea-fowl, wrecks and tem pests. [77] He delights to show us in his famous tailpieces such pictures as the ragged rapscallions that

A bout the year 1800 a man named Watson was executed at Lynn for the murder of his wife and child. The body was taken to Bradenham Heath, and there gibbeted in irons. Some few years ago the gibbet was still standing, and at the foot of it Mr. H. Rider Haggard and his brother found, imbedded in the sod, the upper portion of the iron framing, including the headpiece, with a portion of the skull remaining in it. So it had been withdrawn from sight by kindly nature, in her pitying mood, and covered

T owards the year 1808 a man named Thomas Otter, alias “Tom Temporal,” was hung at Lincoln for the murder of a woman with whom he cohabited there. It appears that she had followed him when returning into Nottinghamshire where his wife lived. At the junction of the two counties he turned on her, like a wild beast, and slew her—in a lane near Saxilby, still called “Gibbet Lane”—and flung the body into a drain dividing the two counties. Not exactly knowing which way to go at the moment, [89] the be