The hanging tree

664 Pages·38.079 MB·English

by  Gatrell, Vic

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SACRAMENTO PUBLIC LIBRARY
3 3029 0iUsi 3187 9554
anging people for small crimes as
well as grave, the Bloody Penal
Code was at its most active
between 1770 and 1830. Some
7,000 men and women were executed on
public scaffolds then, watched by crowds
of thousands. Hanging was confined to
murderers thereafter, but these were still
killed in public until 1868. Clearly the
gallows loomed over much of social life
in this period. But how did those who
watched, read about, or ordered these
strangulations feel about the terror and
suffering inflicted in the law’s name?
What kind of justice was delivered, and
how did it change?
This book is the first to explore what a
wide range of people felt about these
ceremonies (rather than what a few famous
men thought and wrote about them). A
history of mentalities, emotions, and
attitudes rather than of policies and ideas,
it analyses responses to the scaffold at all
social levels: among the crowds which
gathered to watch executions; among
‘polite’ commentators from Boswell and
Byron on to Fry, Thackeray, and Dickens;
and among the judges, home secretary, and
monarch who decided who should hang and
who should be reprieved. Drawing on
letters, diaries, ballads, broadsides, and
images, as well as on poignant appeals for
mercy which historians until now have
barely explored, the book surveys changing
attitudes to death and suffering, ‘sensibility’
and ‘sympathy’, and demonstrates that the
long retreat from public hanging owed less
to the growth of a humane sensibility than
to the development of new methods of
punishment and law enforcement, and to
polite classes’ deepening squeamishness and
fear of the scaffold crowd.
This gripping study is essential reading for
anyone interested in the processes which
have ‘civilized’ our social life. Challenging
many conventional understandings of the
period, V. A. C. Gatrell sets new agendas for
all students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century culture and society, while reflecting
uncompromisingly on the origins and limits
of our modern attitudes to other people’s
misfortunes. Panoramic in range, scholarly
in method, and compelling in argument, this
is one of those rare histories which both
shift our sense of the past and speak
powerfully to the present.
Mn
CENTRAL LIBRAR'
| DEC I994 |
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/hangingtreeexecu0000gatr
THE HANGING TREE

THE
HANGING
TREE
“pe8p xeed
Execution and the English People
1770-1868
Nem pued @ whG eAvleRellse y
OXFORD-UNIV ERSLELY PRESS
1994
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford oxz 6DP
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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press, New York
© V. A. C. Gatrell 1994
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press.
Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the
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under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of
reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning
reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be
sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press,
at the address above
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gatrell, V. A. C., 1941-
The hanging tree... execution and the English people 1770-1868 /
V.A.C. Gatrell.Data available
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Capital punishment—Great Britain—History.
2. Executions and executioners—Great Britain—History.
3. Hanging—Great Britain—History.
HV8699.G8G38 1994 364.6'6'0941—dc20 94-4108
ISBN o-19-820413-2
ils} Se 7 GD) IK) ah 2
Set by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
the Bath Press, Avon
PREFACE
It may help to explain some of this book’s peculiarities if I say at once
that it grew out of a chance discovery. One day I was working in the
Public Record Office on something quite different when tedium and a
passing curiosity moved me to order from the Home Office catalogues
a volume of judges’ reports, then unknown to me. I chose the year 1829
at random. The volume fell open at a thick dossier of petitions and
papers which I was soon reading with the avidity of one who knew that
he really ought to be reading something much less interesting. It was
about a rape case set in the iron-making village of Coalbrookdale in
Shropshire. A poor man called John Noden had for several years been
courting a young woman, Elizabeth Cureton. One June evening he
knocked at her cottage window after her parents had gone to bed. She
let him in, and soon the couple were having sex on the parlour floor. A
few days later she claimed that he had raped her. She prosecuted him at
the Shrewsbury assizes, and he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to
hang. The papers I read were about the Coalbrookdale community’s
efforts to persuade the judge, the home secretary, and George IV to give
Noden a royal pardon.
The dossier’s vividness and complexity surprised me. It contained the
judge’s transcript of the trial; two huge parchment petitions signed by
hundreds of local ironmasters, professionals, and tradesmen; affidavits
from neighbours and ex-lovers telling detailed stories about Elizabeth
Cureton’s earlier sexual adventures; the local doctor’s opinion that this
was no rape but only a ‘sweetheart matter’ gone a little wrong; and the
correspondence between the judge and the home secretary, Robert Peel,
who would decide whether to let Noden die. The whole amounted to
some 12,000 words. I found this Hardyesque tragedy poignant and
entrancing. Unexpectedly, the normally opaque sexual life of a long-ago
community was opened up to me. Also opened was the way the com-
munity related to a penal code which hanged people for rape and many
offences beside, and the casual way great men made life-and-death deci-
sions. I photostated the documents, visited Coalbrookdale (the locations
are astonishingly intact), and, for my own pleasure only, wrote up the
microhistory which became Part V of this book.
Then one thing led to another, as usually happens. Reading more
deeply into the petition archive, I discovered a mountain of appeals for
Vv
PREFACE
mercy, untouched since they had been bound in volumes or tied in
pink-ribboned bundles nearly two centuries ago. Unknown to histori-
ans, there were a couple of thousand for each year of the 1820s alone.
Most were submitted by or on behalf of humble people who faced
death or transportation for transgressions large or small, real, imagined,
or unsatisfactorily proved. The lucky ones got the support of middle-
class or gentry patrons: then dossiers were often thick, stories detailed,
and opinions about unjust trial or excessive punishment confidently
advanced. Even the weakest appeals—scratchily penned, thinly sup-
ported, signed by crosses—quivered with emotion. Humble people and
their supporters pleaded for the fair hearing denied to them in court, for
life itself, or for reprieve from exile across the world. Beneath the formal
deference there were fear and desperation, sometimes indignation and
disbelief, and occasional anger too. Thus I was propelled into the felt
lives of men and women entrammelled by harsh law who had no other
historical voices than these. It was a distorted view I gained: I was read-
ing about the law’s failures rather than about the many cases satisfac-
torily dealt with. But the tone of these appeals matched my own
mounting incredulity at the fates which befell these obscure people and
at the slap-happy justice which sent them to scaffolds or exile for puny
as well as casually tried crimes.
At first my reading aimed only to set Cureton’s and Noden’s story in
context, but slowly the context became my main subject and their story
just one episode in it. As other stories pressed upon me, it became clear
that for many thousands of those past people the law was neither an
ideal nor something to which consent was spontaneously given, but an
arena of unequal negotiation and despair; moreover, it was knitted into
their lives and could shape destinies irretrievably. This realization took
me a long way from the detached kinds of criminal justice history
which historians have recently debated. It left me with a diminished
interest in how far ancien régime criminal law expressed class interests,
for instance, or contrarily in the tacit exculpations of the law which
more conservative historians have advanced. It seemed obvious from
my low angle that rich and strong people used the law to rule weaker
and poorer people, even if criminal law had other faces and could do
nicer things than that. What counted was that these stories fired me
with a taste for the lived experiences of past people which criminal jus-
tice historians have meanly served. It was an emotional and imaginative
engagement with their plights that pushed me forwards, and at last it
took me into a history of emotion itself.
Vi