6 - The Murder Act: Hanging in Chains, 1660–1834

Summary

The Murder Act of 1752 required that criminals who were not dissected to be hung in chains on a gibbet. Yet just as many non-killers were hung in chains during the years 1752–1801 as in 1700–52. And. by the time use of the gibbet was confined strictly to murder, its use against any crime whatsoever had fallen into disfavour. That process was well under way in London no later than 1700 and was apparent in many other places soon after 1750. Urbane people frequently demanded that gibbets be removed to places more remote from respectable residences, and further back from roadsides to avoid offending travellers’ sensibilities. By the nineteenth century, the erection of a gibbet seemed more often an occasion for carnival than a plausible deterrent to crime. Until its abolition in 1834, however, England’s traditional elites clung to the option of the gibbet almost as determinedly as they did to execution for crimes against property.