At first sight it may seem strange that a site so remote from the prisons of Newgate and the Tower should have been chosen. But it was usual, for a reason which will appear, to place the gallows at a considerable distance from the town. The gallows for the county of Surrey was at St. Thomas-a-Waterings, near the second milestone on the Kent Road. Loyseau shows that while the pillory, used for non-capital punishment, was always set up in the principal place or street of a town, capital punishments were carried out at a distance—“le gibet est tousiours emmy les champs.”[93] He refers to Lipsius, who in his turn cites ancient authors to prove the practice. There is, of course, good reason why the place of execution should have been fixed far from the abodes of men. In addition to its gallows, Tyburn had its gibbets, on which bodies of men hanged alive were suffered to hang till they fell to pieces. In other cases bodies were transferred, after hanging, to a gibbet—
“Waving with the weather while their neck will hold.”
PART OF A MAP OF MIDDLESEX, 1607, WITH THE FIRST KNOWN REPRESENTATION OF THE TRIPLE TREE.
In a lease granted by the Prior of the Knights Hospitallers mention is made of Great Gibbet Field and Little Gibbet Field, parcel of the manor of Lilleston.[94] Mr. Loftie says, “We cannot be far wrong in supposing that the gibbets stood near the highway.” The word gibbet was formerly used so loosely that we cannot be sure that the fields did not take their name from the gallows. But Tyburn certainly had, as well as its gallows, gibbets on which were exposed bodies. But this page in the early history of Tyburn is almost a blank. The subjects on which it is most difficult to find information are precisely those of occurrence so common that it has not entered the head of contemporaries to notice them. That gibbets, as distinct from gallows, did exist in early times, there is no doubt; their use continued down to the eighteenth century or later. The old writers do not clearly distinguish between gibbet and gallows, but there is a passage in which Matthew Paris certainly means to speak of a gibbet. In writing of the execution of William Marsh, Matthew Paris leaves it doubtful whether Marsh was or was not at once fixed to a gibbet. But from Gregory’s chronicle we learn that Marsh was first hanged; from Matthew Paris we learn that the body was afterwards hung “on one of the hooks” of a gibbet.[95] In 1306 the body of Simon Fraser was hung on a gibbet for twenty days. In 1324 the king granted a petition of the prelates to permit burial of the bodies of the six barons hanged (not at Tyburn) in 1322.[96] Bodies would hang together for a much longer time. Jean Marteilhe saw, hanging on a gibbet in 1713, the body of Captain Smith, hanged at Execution Dock in 1708.[97]
Thus there must have been an accumulation of bodies swinging from the gibbets of Tyburn and poisoning the air. The French have always been more lavish in public monuments than we. The great gibbet of Montfaucon in the outskirts of Paris was a solid stone structure, with provision for hanging thereon—if we may trust the pictures given of it—at least sixty bodies; it is said that the bodies not unfrequently numbered from sixty to eighty. Under cover of the pestilential air, Maître François Villon, poet of the gibbet, and the cut-purses, his friends, rioted in security from intrusion.[98]
There is very good reason to suppose that a single gallows would not be sufficient for the work to be done at Tyburn. A gallows in the ordinary form, two uprights and a cross-beam, could hardly take more than ten victims at a time. We must suppose that the equipment of Tyburn demanded at least two such gallows. We have seen that in 1220 the king ordered two gallows. But in 1571, just in time for Elizabeth’s penal laws, a great improvement was made in the form of the gallows; a triangular gallows was introduced, capable of hanging at one time at least twenty-four men. This is the highest number recorded as being hanged at one time, but it does not follow that the capacity of the gallows was exhausted by this number. The evidence for the introduction of the triangular gallows at this time is contained in the account of the execution of Dr. Story:—
“The first daye of June [1571] the saide Story was drawn upon an herdell from the Tower of London unto Tiborn, wher was prepared for him a newe payre of gallowes made in triangular maner.”[99]
There is no earlier account of a triangular gallows. My friend, Mr. P. A. Daniel, tells me that he knows of no reference in the old drama to the triangular form of the gallows of date prior to 1571.
The earliest allusion to this form seems to be in 1589:—