But the system, like all violent systems, was not deterrent—indeed, a multitude of men hanging in chains seems to affect the spectator rather as a curious sight than as the necessary and proper consequence of transgression.
MILES’S IRONS, 1791.
(From “Obsolete Punishments,” by C. Madeley.)
Five months after the death of the last-mentioned criminal, Edward Miles was executed and hung in chains, not only for robbing the mail, but for murdering the postboy also. It was a serious case, and the man was hung, and gibbeted in irons on the Manchester road, near the Twystes. These irons, of a very careful manufacture, were dug up on the spot in 1845, and falling into the hands of the late Mr. Beaumont, are now preserved in the Warrington Museum.
In 1796 James Price and Thomas Brown were hung in chains on one gibbet at Trafford, between Chester and Tarporley. A print in the account of the trial shows the carcasses in iron frames shaped to the body like the Warrington example.[75]
To take again a southern case. In 1799 two brothers named Drewett, for attacking the Portsmouth mail, in the delightful district of Midhurst, were executed on Horsham Common, and their bodies taken to the scene of the robbery, and hung up in irons. This event still lingers in memory in the district, and the more so, perhaps, because the younger of the two convicts is believed to have had the nobility to suffer for his father, whose guilt he would not disclose.[76] The “last dying speeches” of these two men, printed with uncouth verbiage, and picturesque deformity of language, is still occasionally to be met with.
