THIRTEEN-PENCE HALFPENNY.
Hangman’s Wages.
Jack Ketch a Gentleman.
Dr. Samuel Pegge, who is likely to be remembered by readers of the [article] on the Revolution-house at Whittington, he having, on the day he entered his eighty-fifth year, preached the centenary sermon to commemorate the Revolution, was an eminent antiquary. He addressed a paper to the Society of Antiquaries, on “the vulgar notion, though it will not appear to be a vulgar error, that thirteen-pence halfpenny is the fee of the executioner in the common line of business at Tyburn,[487] and that, therefore, it is called hangman’s wages.” It is proposed from this paper to give an account of the origin of the saying.
According to Dr. Pegge, the office of hangman was, in some parts of the kingdom, annexed to other posts; for the porter of the city of Canterbury was the executioner for the county of Kent, temporibus Hen. II. and Hen. III.; for which he had an allowance from the sheriff, who was reimbursed from the exchequer, of twenty shillings per annum.[488] From the great and general disesteem wherein the office is held, the sheriffs are much obliged to those who will undertake it, as otherwise its unpleasant and painful duty must fall upon themselves. For, to them the law looks for its completion, as they give a receipt to the gaoler for the bodies of condemned criminals whom they are to punish, or cause to be punished, according to their respective sentences. Sometimes in the country, sheriffs have had much difficulty to procure an executioner. In short, although, in the eyes of the people generally, a stigma attaches to the hangman, yet, in fact, the hangman is the sheriff’s immediate deputy in criminal matters, as his under-sheriff is for civil purposes. The nature and dignity of the office in some particulars, and the rank of the officer, called Squire Ketch, will be found to be supportable, as well as the fee of office.
And first, as regards the sheriff himself. The sheriff is, by being so styled in the king’s patent under the great seal, an esquire, which raises him to that rank, unless he has previously had the title adventitiously. None were anciently chosen sheriffs, but such gentlemen whose fortunes and stations would warrant it; so, on the other hand, merchants, and other liberal branches of the lower order, were admitted first into the rank of gentlemen, by a grant of arms, on proper qualifications, from the earl marshal, and the kings of arms, respectively, according to their provinces. After a negotiant has become a gentleman, courtesy will very soon advance that rank, and give the party the title of esquire; and so it happened with a worthy gentleman, for so a hangman will be proved to have been. This remarkable case happened in the year 1616, in the manner following.
Ralph Brooke, whose real name was Brokesmouth, at that time “York herald,” put a trick upon sir William Segar, “garter king of arms,” which had very nearly cost both of them their places. Brooke employed a person to carry a coat of arms ready drawn to garter, and to pretend it belonged to one Gregory Brandon, a gentleman who had formerly lived in London, but was then residing in Spain. The messenger was instructed to desire garter to set his hand to this coat of arms: and to prevent deliberation, he was further to pretend that the vessel, which was to carry this confirmation into Spain, when it had received the seal of the office and garter’s hand, was just ready to sail.[489] This being done, and the fees paid, Brooke carried it to Thomas earl of Arundel, then one of the commissioners for executing the office of earl marshal; and, in order to vilify garter, and to represent him as a rapacious, negligent officer, assured his lordship that those were the arms of Arragon, with a canton for Brabant, and that Gregory Brandon was a mean and inconsiderable person. This was true enough; for he was the common hangman for London and Middlesex. Ralph Brooke afterwards confessed all these circumstances to the commissioners who represented the earl marshal; the consequence of which was, that, by order of the king, when he heard the case, garter was committed to prison for negligence, and the herald for treachery. There was this previous result, however, that Gregory Brandon, the hangman, had become a gentleman; and, as the Bastard says in King John, “could make any Joan a gentlewoman.”
Thus was this Gregory Brandon advanced, perhaps from the state of a convict, to the rank of a gentleman; and though it was a personal honour to himself, notwithstanding it was surreptitiously obtained by the herald, of which Gregory Brandon, gentleman, was perhaps ignorant, yet did it operate so much on his successors in office, that afterwards it became transferred from the family to the officer for the time being; and from Mr. Brandon’s popularity, though not of the most desirable kind, the mobility soon improved his rank, and, with a jocular complaisance, gave him the title of esquire, which remains to this day.
It seems too as if this office had once, like many other important offices of state, been hereditary. Shakspeare has this passage in Coriolanus, act ii. sc. 1.—
“Menenius.—Marcius, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors, since Deucalion; though, peradventure, some of the best of them were hereditary hangmen.”
This looks as if the office of executioner had run in some family for a generation or two, at the time when Shakspeare wrote; and that it was a circumstance well understood, and would be well relished, at least by the galleries. This might, indeed, with regard to time, point at the ancestors of Mr. Brandon himself; for it was in the reign of king James I. that this person was brought within the pale of gentility. Nay, more, we are told by Dr. Grey, in his Notes on Shakspeare,[490] that from this gentleman, the hangmen, his successors, bore for a considerable time his Christian name of Gregory, though not his arms, they being a personal honour, till a greater man arose, viz. Jack Ketch, who entailed the present official name on all who have hitherto followed him.[491]
Whether the name of Ketch be not the provincial pronunciation of Catch among the cockneys, may be doubted, notwithstanding that learned and laborious compiler, B. E., gent., the editor of the “Canting Dictionary,” says that Jack Kitch, for so he spells it, was the real name of a hangman, which has become that of all his successors.
So much for the office. It now remains to consider the emoluments which appertain to it, and assign a reason why thirteen-pence halfpenny should be esteemed its standard fee for inflicting the last stroke of the law.
Before proceeding to matters of a pecuniary nature, it may be allowed, perhaps, to illustrate a Yorkshire saying. It was occasioned by a truly unfortunate man, whose guilt was doubtful, and yet suffered the sentence of the law at York. This person was a saddler at Bawtry, and hence the saying among the lower people to a man who quits his friends too early, and will not stay to finish his bottle:—“He will be hanged for leaving his liquor, like the saddler of Bawtry.” The case was this:—There was formerly an ale-house, which house to this day is called “The Gallows House,” situate between the city of York and their Tyburn; at this house the cart used always to stop, and there the convict and the other parties were refreshed with liquors; but the rash and precipitate saddler of Bawtry, on his road to the fatal tree, refused this little regale, and hastened on to the place of execution; where, but not until after he had been turned off, and it was too late, a reprieve arrived. Had he stopped, as was usual, at the gallows house, the time consumed there would have been the means of saving his life. He was hanged, as truly as unhappily, for leaving his liquor.
Similar means of refreshment were anciently allowed to convicts, on their passage to Tyburn, at St. Giles’s hospital; for we are told by Stowe, that they were there presented with a bowl of ale, called “St. Giles’s bowl; thereof to drink at their pleasure, as their last refreshing in this life.” Tyburn was the established scene of executions in common cases so long ago as the first year of king Henry IV.; Smithfield and St. Giles’s Field being reserved for persons of higher rank, and for crimes of uncommon magnitude, such as treason and heresy. In the last of these, sir John Oldcastle, lord Cobham, was burnt, or rather roasted, alive; having been hanged up over the fire by a chain which went round his waist.[492]
The executioner of the duke of Monmouth (in July, 1685) was peculiarly unsuccessful in the operation. The duke said to him, “Here are six guineas for you: pray do your business well; do not serve me as you did my lord Russell: I have heard you struck him three or four times. Here, (to his servant,) take these remaining guineas, and give them to him if he does his work well.”
Executioner.—“I hope I shall.”
Monmouth.—“If you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir. Pr’ythee let me feel the axe.” He felt the edge, and said, “I fear it is not sharp enough.”
Executioner.—“It is sharp enough, and heavy enough.”
The executioner proceeded to do his office; but the note says, “it was under such distraction of mind, that he fell into the very error which the duke had so earnestly cautioned him to avoid; wounding him so slightly, that he lifted up his head, and looked him in the face, as if to upbraid him for making his death painful; but said nothing. He then prostrated himself again, and received two other ineffectual blows; upon which the executioner threw down his axe in a fit of horror; crying out, ‘he could not finish his work:’ but, on being brought to himself by the threats of the sheriffs, took up the fatal weapon again, and at two other strokes made a shift to separate the head from the body.”[493]
As to the fee itself, “thirteen-pence half-penny—hangman’s wages,” it appears to have been of Scottish extraction. The Scottish mark (not ideal or nominal money, like our mark) was a silver coin, in value thirteen-pence halfpenny and two placks, or two-thirds of a penny; which plack is likewise a coin. This, their mark, bears the same proportion to their pound, which is twenty-pence, as our mark does to our pound, or twenty shillings, being two-thirds of it. By these divisions and sub-divisions of their penny (for they have a still smaller piece, called a bodel or half a plack) they can reckon with the greatest minuteness, and buy much less quantities of any article than we can.[494] This Scottish mark was, upon the union of the two crowns in the person of king James I., made current in England at the value of thirteen-pence halfpenny, (without regarding the fraction,) by proclamation, in the first year of that king; where it is said, that “the coin of silver, called the mark piece, shall be from henceforth current within the said kingdom of England, at the value of thirteen-pence halfpenny.”[495] This, probably, was a revolution in the current money in favour of the hangman, whose fee before was perhaps no more than a shilling. There is, however, very good reason to conclude, from the singularity of the sum, that the odious title of “hangman’s wages” became at this time, or soon after, applicable to the sum of thirteen-pence halfpenny. Though it was contingent, yet it was then very considerable pay; when one shilling per day was a standing annual stipend to many respectable officers of various kinds.
Nothing can well vary more than the perquisites of this office; for it is well known that Jack Ketch has a post-obit interest in the convict, being entitled to his clothes, or to a composition for them; though, on the other hand, they must very frequently be such garments that, as Shakspeare says, “a hangman would bury with those who wore them.”[496]
This emolument is of no modern date, and has an affinity to other droits on very dissimilar occasions, which will be mentioned presently. The executioner’s perquisite is at least as old as Henry VIII.; for sir Thomas More, on the morning of his execution, put on his best gown, which was of silk camlet, sent him as a present while he was in the Tower by a citizen of Lucca, with whom he had been in correspondence; but the lieutenant of the Tower was of opinion that a worse gown would be good enough for the person who was to have it, meaning the executioner, and prevailed upon sir Thomas to change it, which he did for one made of frize.[497] Thus the antiquity of this obitual emolument, so well known in Shakspeare’s time, seems well established; and, as to its nature, has a strong resemblance to a fee of a much longer standing, and formerly received by officers of very great respectability. For anciently “garter king of arms” had specifically the gown of the party on the creation of a peer; and again, when archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors, did homage to the king, their upper garment was the perquisite even of the lord chamberlain of the household. The fee in the latter case was always compounded for, though garter’s was often formerly received in kind, inasmuch as the statute which gives this fee to the lord chamberlain directs the composition, because, as the words are, “it is more convenient that religious men should fine for their upper garment, than to be stripped.”[498] The same delicate necessity does not operate in the hangman’s case, and his fee extends much farther than either of them, he being entitled to all the sufferer’s garments, having first rendered them useless to the party. Besides this perquisite, there has always been a pecuniary compliment, where it could possibly be afforded, given by the sufferer to the executioner, to induce him to be speedy and dexterous in the operation. These outward gifts may likewise be understood as tokens of inward forgiveness.
“Upon the whole,” says Dr. Pegge, “I conceive that what I have offered above, though with much enlargement, is the meaning of the ignominious term affixed to the sum of thirteen-pence halfpenny, and I cannot but commiserate those for whom it is to be paid.”[499]
[487] “The executions, on ordinary occasions, were removed from this memorable place, and were performed in the street of the Old Bailey, at the door of Newgate. This was first practised on the 9th of December, 1783. See the printed account. Every of these executions I was told by Mr. Reed, 1785, is attended with an expense of upwards of nine pounds. Twenty persons were hanged at once in February, 1785.”—Dr. Pegge.
[488] Madox’s History of the Exchequer, ii. p. 373.
[489] These arms actually appear in Edmondson’s Body of Heraldry, annexed to the name of Brandon, viz. the arms of Arragon with a difference, and the arms of Brabant in a canton.
[490] Vol. ii, p. 163.
[491] The hangman was known by the name of Gregory in the year 1642, as we learn from the Mercurius Aulicus, p. 553.
[492] Rapin. See also Bale’s Life and Trial of Sir John Oldcastle. St. Giles’s was then an independent village, and is still called St. Giles’s in the Fields, to distinguish it from St. Giles’s, Cripplegate; being both in the same diocese.
[493] Lord Somers’s Tracts, vol. i. pp. 219, 220; the note taken from the Review of the reigns of Charles and James, p. 885.
[494] Mr. Ray, in his Itinerary, gives the fractional parts of the Scottish penny.
[495] The proclamation may be seen in Strype’s Annals, vol. iv. p. 384, where the mark-piece is valued exactly at thirteen-pence halfpenny.
[496] Coriolanus, act. i. sc. 8.
[497] More’s Life of sir Thomas More, p. 271.
[498] Stat. 13 Edward I.
[499] Pegge’s Curialia Miscellanea.