PUNISHING the CRIMINAL CORPSE, 1700-1840 Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England
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palgrave historical studies in the criminal corpse and its afterlife PUNISHING THE CRIMINAL CORPSE, 1700-1840 Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England Peter King Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife Series Editors Owen Davies School of Humanities University of Hertfordshire Hatfield, UK Elizabeth T. Hurren School of Historical Studies University of Leicester Leicester, UK Sarah Tarlow History and Archaeology University of Leicester Leicester, UK This limited, finite series is based on the substantive outputs from a major, multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust, inves- tigating the meanings, treatment, and uses of the criminal corpse in Britain. It is a vehicle for methodological and substantive advances in approaches to the wider history of the body. Focussing on the period between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries as a crucial period in the formation and transformation of beliefs about the body, the series explores how the criminal body had a prominent presence in popular culture as well as science, civic life and medico-legal activity. It is historically significant as the site of overlapping and sometimes contradictory understandings between scientific anatomy, criminal justice, popular medicine, and social geography. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14694 Peter King Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700–1840 Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England Peter King University of Leicester Leicester, UK Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife ISBN 978-1-137-51360-1 ISBN 978-1-137-51361-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51361-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944586 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication. The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty; The Reward of Cruelty, 1751. © Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom This book is dedicated to Lee Hodgson-King and Joshua King ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the support of the Wellcome Trust. This research was funded by their programme grant WT095904AIA ‘Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse’. I would also like to thank the entire team working on that project: Sarah Tarlow, Elizabeth Hurren, Owen Davies, Francesca Matteoni, Shane McCorristone, Floris Tomasini, Rachel Bennett, Emma Battell Lowman, Zoe Dyndor and especially Richard Ward who has kindly read and criticized the manuscript as well as providing the vast majority of the research material and being a great companion on our trips to Wales and elsewhere. Thanks also to my old friend Randy McGowen who kindly read some of the chapters, and to John Beattie for inspiring me during my many years of writing on criminal justice history. Especial thanks to my wife and son, to whom this volume is dedicated, for putting up with my post-retirement toils on this book. For inspiration during the process special thanks to Bruce Cockburn, Ian Adams, E.P. Thompson, Richard Rohr, Brian Mclaren, Henri Nouwen and the writer of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes (especially Chap. 9, verse 7 and of course Chap. 12, verse 12.) vii CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 ‘Hanging not Punishment Enough’: Attitudes to Aggravated Forms of Execution and the Making of the Murder Act 1690–1752 29 3 Patterns of Post-execution Sentencing in England and Wales 1752–1834. The Murder Act in Operation 77 4 Changing Attitudes to Post-execution Punishment 1752–1834 113 5 Conclusion 183 Index 205 ix LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 3 Fig. 1 Corpses hung in chains under the Murder Act, 1752–1832 (including Admiralty cases) 86 Fig. 2 Corpses hung in chains for non-killing offences, 1752–1832 (including Admiralty cases) 87 Fig. 3 Corpses made available to the surgeons under the Murder Act, 1752–1832 (including Admiralty cases) 94 xi LIST OF TABLES Chapter 2 Table 1 Types of aggravated execution and post-execution punishment advocated for murderers and property offenders between 1694 and 1752 32 Chapter 3 Table 1 Outcomes of convictions under the Murder Act 81 Table 2 Patterns of post-execution punishments 1752–1834; by court and type of case 83 Table 3 a Number of Murder Act Sentences involving dissection/ gibbeting by decade 1752–1832; Assizes and Admiralty courts (pardons excluded). b Proportion of Murder Act Sentences involving hanging in chains (HIC). By decade 1752–1832. Assizes and Admiralty courts (pardons excluded) 85 Table 4 Sentences under the Murder Act—dissection or hanging in chains—by county 1752–1832 89 Table 5 Number hung in chains, non-killing offences by county 1752– 1832 91 xiii ABSTRACT This volume analyses the different types of post-execution punishments and other aggravated execution practices (such as breaking on the wheel) that were discussed by contemporaries; the reasons why they were advocated; and the decision, enshrined in the 1752 Murder Act, to make two post-execution punishments—dissection and hanging in chains—an inte- gral part of sentences for murder. After tracing the origins of the 1752 Act it then explores the ways that Act was actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at change over time—at the abandonment of burning at the stake in the 1790s, at the rapid decline of hanging in chains just after 1800, and then at the final abandonment of both dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It also analyses the changing attitudes that led contemporaries both to advocate the use of post-execution punishments against murderers and to suggest that they also be used against other categories of offender, but then to turn decisively away from their use. It concludes that the Murder Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an important role within the broader capital punishment system well into the nineteenth century, and that both Gatrell’s and Garland’s models of penal change need to be modified in the light of this. Although eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied both the ‘Bloody Code’ that made a huge variety of offences into capital crimes, and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’, they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital punishment system—the courts extensive use of aggravated and post-execution punishments—and this book aims to rectify this. xv CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1CORE AIMS By analysing the development of attitudes, legislative initiatives and actual policies in relation to post-execution punishment and other aggravated execution practices, this volume aims to establish the important role the criminal corpse played within penal policy in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. A variety of execution procedures, involving either a more painful death or further punishment of the criminal’s corpse after death (or both), were extensively discussed in this period. Many of these were never actually used in England and Wales but a limited range of post-execution punishments—most notably dissection and hanging in chains—were widely utilized by the courts and the criminal justice authorities in various contexts between 1700 and the 1830s. Using newly collected data on court sentences involving post-execution punishments covering every county in England and Wales, this volume presents the first systematic analysis of the ways the use of the criminal corpse added a new depth to the capital sanctions imposed on the bodies of offenders in this vital period. This research forms part of a much broader project funded by the Wellcome Trust entitled ‘Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse’, which focused mainly on the period from the late-seventeenth to the nineteenth century and explored the social, medicinal, symbolic and curative power of the criminal corpse, as well as its use for judicial/penal purposes. In particular the arguments presented here intersect with those © The Author(s) 2017 1 P.