Category:Tyburn

Tyburn was the site of public executions in London in the early modern period. According to Gregory Durston, executions "were held eight times a year [approximately], a few days after the Newgate sessions"; further, "[i]t was rare that fewer than 20 to 30 people, both men and women, were executed at" one time (652). Durston quotes Thomas Platter on the process:

... when the trial is over, those condemned to the rope are placed on a cart, each one with a rope about his neck, and the hangman drives with them out of the town to the gallows, called Tyburn, almost an hour away from the city, there he fastens them up one after another by the rope and drives the cart off under the gallows which is not very high off the ground; then the criminal's friends come and draw them down by their feet, that they may die all the sooner" (as quoted by Durston from M. Van Muyden (Trans. and Ed.), A foreign View of England in the reigns of George I and George II ... [London, John Murray, 1902, p. 126]).

Durston comments on foreign travellers' surprise at the apparent jollity of the condemned who rode "six to a cart, on their way to Tyburn" (653), but he attributes such behavior to their not having been tortured before their convictions as well as to drunkenness; summarizing Bernard de Mandeville's observations in An Enquiry into the Course of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725), Durston says that the parade to the scaffold included "six stops at taverns on the way" (654). Durston credits Mandeville also with being "horrified at the lack of contrition" among the prisoners and "the carnival atmosphere" of the proceedings, heightened by the condemned who "jested and swore" (655).

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