HANGMAN'S HIGHWAY: THE ROAD TO TYBURN
Tyburn:
That most celebrated place,
Where angry justice shows her awful face;
Where little villains must submit to fate,
That great ones may enjoy the world in state.
Let us now see something of that road—that Via Dolorosa, as we may in all fitness call it—along which the condemned, highwaymen and others, went to Tyburn Tree. I shall style it "Hangman's Highway." It is not a pretty name, and it was never its official designation; but it is an apt one. Since 1783, when it lost that unenviable notoriety, its social status has continually risen, and there is now not a more respectable three-miles stretch of thoroughfare in London.
It had in remote ages been "Hangman's Highway," for from the west gateway in the wall of Roman Londinium, from the spot in after-years known as "Newgate," the malefactors of the Roman period were marched out and done to death. But in mediæval times, the citizens of London, not then so easily moved at the sight of executions, were content to allow criminals to be put to death in their midst, and we read of executions on Cornhill. A little later, and we find Smithfield chosen; a spot called "The Elms," apparently situated opposite where St. Bartholomew's Hospital stands, being the place where, not only criminals of low degree, but many of high rank suffered. Here the Scottish patriot, Wallace, was hanged in 1305, and here Mortimer was executed in 1330.
Holinshed, indeed, deriving his information from Adam Murimuth, tells a different tale. He says, of Mortimer: "He was at London drawne and hanged at the commen place of execution called in those daies The Elmes, and now Tiborne, as in some bookes we find."
But there is some confusion of ideas here: Tyburn did not become a place of execution until long after, and St. Giles's was the next site of the gallows.