Capital Punishment in Northern England 1750-1900

This book seeks to describe how criminals were put to death in northern England between 1750 and 1900 It begins by outlining the regime and hardships to which English capital prisoners in general and northern prisoners in particular were subject. It then examines northern executions during the era of public executions. Topics discussed under this head include out-of-town hangings; the advent of the prison-drop, the advantages and disadvantages of the drop and the reasons why some parts...
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This book seeks to describe how criminals were put to death in northern England between 1750 and 1900 It begins by outlining the regime and hardships to which English capital prisoners in general and northern prisoners in particular were subject. It then examines northern executions during the era of public executions. Topics discussed under this head include out-of-town hangings; the advent of the prison-drop, the advantages and disadvantages of the drop and the reasons why some parts of the north were so slow to adopt it; the York practice of employing inmates of its Castle prison as hangmen; the numbers hanged, their crimes and demeanour on the scaffold; the impact upon executions of the advent of the railways; the size and behaviour of execution crowds; the differences between northern and metropolitan executions, and how far northern hanging reports bear out what Victor Gatrell has to say about the way the condemned and the crowd behaved at executions, and in particular his assertion that the levity and horseplay indulged in by London crowds was their way of coping with the horror of execution and the memento mori which it involved. Also discussed is the claim, made before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1863 that provincial crowds were better behaved than those at Newgate. The final section of the thesis considers, from both a national and northern perspective, the regime of private executions established by the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, 1868. Topics examined include the location of prison gallows, the hangmen employed, the introduction of the long drop, public interest in prison executions, the exclusion of the press from such executions and the marked change in the status of executioners which followed the coming into force of the Act. Appendices to the text give details of the number of persons executed in northern England during the period 1750-1900, and of northern gallows and execution routes (the latter enabling visitors who are interested to identify for themselves the sites where northerners were put to death).