Public-domain ebook
by Alfred Marks
Language: en1,147 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: History - British·History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)·History - Modern (1750+)
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #56503.
Alfred Marks’s Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals is a scholarly survey of England’s most infamous execution site. The work opens with a striking quotation from an 1818 prison memoir, then launches into a preface that frames the study of Tyburn as a way to examine the relationship between state power and punishment. From the outset Marks promises a wide‑ranging account, moving from the grim logistics of the three‑mile procession to the legal and social forces that produced the “triangular gallows.” Detailed illustrations, drawings by Matthew Paris, prints from the Gardner Collection, and maps by John Norden, are interspersed with chapters on who was executed, how the hangings were carried out, and the evolution of capital law, all anchored in the book’s extensive index and annals.
The narrative is written in a measured, nineteenth‑century voice, blending moral reflection with meticulous documentary evidence. Its style is formal yet vivid, employing period‑appropriate references to contemporary jurists, reformers and literary figures. Readers with an interest in legal history, early‑modern British crime, or the cultural history of public spectacle will find Marks’s exhaustive compilation both informative and compelling.
The opening · free to read
How our fathers lived is a subject of never-failing interest: of some interest it may be to inquire how they died—at Tyburn. The story has many aspects, some noble, some squalid, some pathetic, some revolting. If I am reproached with dwelling on the horrors of Tyburn, I take refuge under the wing of the great Lipsius, who, in his treatise De Cruce, has lavished the stores of his appalling erudition on a subject no less terrible.
But the subject has an interest other than antiquarian. We are to-day far from the point of view of Shelley—
“Power like a desolating pestilence Pollutes whate’er it touches.”
The general tendency is all towards extending the power of governments. Some would fain extend the sphere of the State’s activity so as to give to the State control over almost every action of our daily lives. It may therefore be not without use to recall how governments have dealt with the people in the past. The State never voluntarily surrenders anything of its power. Less than a hundred years ago, ministers stoutly defended their privilege of tearing out a man’s bowels and burning them before his eyes. The State devised and executed hideous punishments, sometimes made still more hideous by the ferocity of its instruments, the judges. All mitigation of these punishments has been forced on the State by “idealists.” The State dragged its victims, almost naked, three miles over a rough road. The hands of compassionate friars placed the sufferer on a hurdle—not without threats of punishment for so doing. In the end, the State adopted the hurdle. So it has always been. Not a hundred years ago, Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, could see no reason for altering the law which awarded the penalty of death to one who had stolen from a shop goods to the value of five shillings. To Romilly, though he did not live to see this result of his untiring labours in the cause of humanity, we may gratefully ascribe the abolition of the extreme penalty for this offence.
On this field, as on others, the victories of civilisation have been won by the individual in conflict with the community.
I desire to thank Mr. C. W. Moule, the Librarian of Corpus Christi College, and the College authorities, for permission, most courteously granted, to reproduce the drawing by Matthew Paris showing Sir William de Marisco being drawn to the gallows.
I am indebted to Mr. Herbert Sieveking for permission to reproduce, from a photograph taken for him, the print from the Gardner Collection showing an execution at Tyburn. I am in an especial degree obliged to him for calling my attention to Norden’s map of Middlesex, the subject of an article by him in the Daily Graphic of September 4, 1908.
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