Those delivered for dissection in the heartland of the East Midlands set medico-legal standards for many provincial English towns. In the chapter's final section 5, therefore, several of the most iconic images with famous characters condemned. On arrival at the gallows he had to be tied around the base of the gallows.
Another medical shortcoming was that it was common to measure height but not body weight before execution in the eighteenth century. Therefore, tying the hangman's knot was not simply about efficient execution. In the opinion of the doctors present, most of the criminals, even after being hanged for forty minutes, could recover completely.
For it is a material fact that the damned in a bodily history have been a stable subject of biological continuity. It was a meeting of the senses that legitimized the surgeons' actions at the handover, and which historians can better appreciate. 35 Medically speaking, chemical changes in the muscle should have occurred after cellular respiration stopped in the convict's deep tissues.
Later in Section 4 we will see that much of the heading's detail was also duplicated in the East Midlands.
Given the prisoner's notoriety, full and efficient justice had to be meted out. On examination by the surgeon, the neck 'turned out not to be broken, from the extreme strength of the muscles, the deceased was what is called a bull's neck'. The naked corpse was laid on the bare ground to define it as the "other".
There was therefore a 'solemn, slow and symbolic procession', making no sensational representations of the corpse now that they were 'in the name of Death'. The surgeons now took center stage as they dealt with the medical condition of the peri-mortem bodies. It was now possible to arrange that, as there was not sufficient physical space for the execution crowd to be part of the dissection in the kitchen, they should go out before the extremities were cut from the torso.
The gallows was then moved to the front of the Shire Hall, which was rebuilt around the time of the Murder Act. In front is a clock that strikes the hour on a bell on the roof of the building'. The biblical theme of the 'wages of sin is death' was preached from the pulpit by a clergyman exhorting to repentance.
On the morning of the execution, it took six men to get him out of his cell, he managed to jump from the cart carrying him, and the crowd is said to be in "great amazement and excitement". He had hung for a few seconds when the knot of the rope gave way and the wretched man fell heavily to the ground. This seems to explain why some of the Murder Act engravings became so notorious in contemporary culture.
This general subtext is repeated when placing objects on the floor, flanked by a basket of medical supplies and a syringe. Thus, according to eighteenth-century sensibilities, a person on the border between life and death seems to be in the worst condition of all "The Name of Death." We see what the crowd would watch as they followed the "good body" on the way to the condemned.
These trends lead us to William Hogarth's famous images of criminal dissections and what they reveal about bodies being punished in the presence of a crowd. The cut of the dissector's knife was a well-known health risk for the criminal surgeon on duty (see Chapters 5 and 6 for more details). Above all, it was the condition of the criminal's corpse that shaped what would happen after the gallows.
A wide variety of contemporary sources suggest that the power of the criminal corps was variable and pluralistic.
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Opening up the criminal justice system to try to increase the deterrent value of the death penalty therefore had a worrying downside. Coming closer to the dilemmas contemporaries encountered, Part II of this book now travels further with the criminal corpse that caught widespread 'public curiosity' in English provincial life. Simon Devereaux (2009), 'Recasting the Theater of Execution: the Abolition of the Tyburn Ritual', Past and Present, Vol.
Thomas Stuttaford, “Swift end rests with skill of the hangman,” Times Online, (January 1, 2007), http://www.timesonline.co.uk/. 64, explains that Cromwell was responsible for the first executions of the Reformation under Henry VIII. He was the nephew of William Hey senior, the leading surgeon in Leeds who received the bodies on the gallows in the city.
For example, Jane Clark, wife of Alan Clark MP records that Alan's body laid out for burial in their bedroom 'I must say made our room a little high, and the window had to be closed because of the flies' . Lambert, medical commentator (1831), 'Letter to Lancet: Effects of Hanging Upon the Organs of Secretions & so on', Lancet dated 14 Sept., published in the Sept. Letter to Lancet: Occurrence of Menstruation during Hanging', Lancet , letter dated September 1, published in the Sept.
John William Holloway (1831), An Authentic and Faithful History of the Atrocious Murder of Celia Holloway, (London: W. Clowes and Son Ltd), p. Evidence compiled from contemporary reports in 'Holloway's Narrative', The Observer, 22 August 1831, and Brighton Herald, 20 August 1831. CHALCRAFT, Executed in August, 1818 for the cruel murder of Chennelming's father, his landlord. -transcript available at http://www.exclas-sics.com/newgate/ng577.htm ; and detailed contemporary newspaper reports in The Examiner, No 555 (16 August 1818), p.
See, The Observer, 16 August 1818 and a subsequent 'Report of the Trial of Chennell and Chalcraft' published as a pamphlet by Duncombe, 19 Little Queen Street, Holborn, 1818. He carried out 44 hangings in the East Midlands and this he seems to account for another 22 elsewhere, a total of 66 between 1820 and 1847. These are widely recorded in local histories such as John Potter Briscoe (1895), The Old Guild Hall and Prison of Nottingham (Nottingham: . Sutton and Sons); James Granger (1907), 'The Old Streets of Nottingham', Transactions of the Thornton Society, Volumes III and IV , 3 and 7 February issues.
