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Thursday, January 30, 2020

History According to Bob - Executioners of England

English Executioner Mr Bull:

"During the reign of Henry the Seven there was a law in force in Kent that stated if the prosecutor could not find a hangman to execute a fellow he had brought to justice, he the prosecutor must do the job himself, or himself go to prison... Executioners during this period were required to be butchers as well as hangmen. So they would be responsible for hanging which isn't that technical, but they'd also be required for torturing people, for drawing and quartering people - that didn't that very often, but it's usually for someone special, shall we say?... One answer to the great demand for executioners was to make other criminals assist at the executions... There are quite a few records of victims of the scaffold assumed to be dead, being found later to be live. And it has been admitted that the distinct possibility that common hangman may have actually buried alive many of these people during that time period"


Executioners Banks and Arnet:

"For long period of time there were eight hanging days a year at Tyburn and they were public holidays, commonly known as Paddington fair. So have you heard oh, yeah, I'm going to a Paddington fair, no you're going to a Tyburn execution, what’s you're going to do. Well, nobody worked on that day. So there were lots of people that come out and see the action. Noisy crowds lined the streets as criminals to be executed were taken by cart from Newgate prison or the tower to Tyburn."


Executioner Edward Dennis Pt 1:

"Forgery always brings up my favorite story from the French Revolution. On Bastille Day, when the people broke into the Bastille because they thought it was full of French citizens who had been accused falsely by the nobility, they looked and they looked and they looked and they didn't find the Iron Man in the iron mask and they were really disappointed to find that there were only seven people basically in prison, of which four of them were forgers. So they were immediately released. That's in the morning. By the afternoon they all had been arrested for forging, so obviously some people get addicted to it"


Executioner Edward Dennis Pt 2:

"Now executions would take place in front of Newgate prison… decision to end executions at Tyburn was made for good practical reasons. Not only was the expansion of London leading to increased traffic, which was obstructed on execution days, but the west end of the capital is becoming a fashionable residential and business area for which the scaffold and the noisy and unruly mobs lining the route were hardly a good advertisement. But the change provoked a famous outburst from Dr. Samuel Johnson who fumed with characteristic bombast against the complaint that Tyburn drew a multitude of spectators, ‘Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose’"


Executioner William Brunskill Part 1:

"1790 was also a year notable in England for a clear demonstration of sheer idiocy of imposing the death penalty for crimes against property. A man named Williams was arrested for stabbing a girl named Anne Porter. The knife wound, however, wasn't fatal. He was charged with wounding, which was not a capital offense and the capital offense of ‘unlawfully willfully and maliciously spoiling, tearing, cutting and defacing the cloak, the gown, the petticoat and the shift of the victim and was found guilty. It was appealed to the court of errors and his verdict was overturned on the grounds that Williams’ intention was to damage the girl not her clothes. So in the end, he got two years in prison, so her clothes were worth more than she was...
But by now the execution business was slowing down... in 1788, transportation of criminals to Australia began to take place and take place on a large scale, and many of these people who would have been hanged for crimes that fell under the Black Act...part of this is deportation. They're also sending some of these people to Georgia, the Georgia colony, but most of them are going to Australia. So people were coming to the conclusion that the death penalty wasn't effective. They might as well just get rid of the people. The other thing was the juries were regularly refusing to convict on capital charges by simply undervaluing stolen or damaged property, because they thought it was stupid to be hanging people for such a small sum of money"


Executioner William Calcraft Part 3:

"So there's quite a discussion going on in England at this point doing away with public execution, which were originally supposed to, you know, show people what would happen, then it would be a deterrent. But since it becomes such a carnival, if you will, I would point out that when they you know, when they had that section where the people were mad because the guy died too quickly, that's exactly the response people had in the first criminal being executed by the guillotine. Because it had happened so fast. There wasn't any to it and it was over with, and they started screaming and yelling, and they wanted the rope back. They wanted the gallows back. And some people thought that was the crowd saying, well, that's because this is too horrible. No, it wasn't. There wasn't any spectacle to it. It was just too fast"
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