Tyburn's Martyrs Execution in England, 1675-1775 [Hardcover]

The public execution at Tyburn is one of the most evocative and familiar of all eighteenth-century images. Whether it elicits horror or prurient fascination - or both - the Tyburn hanging day has become synonymous with the brutality of a bygone age and a legal system which valued property over human life. But, as this fascinating cultural and social history of the gallows reveals, the early modern execution was far more than just a debased spectator sport. The period between the Restoration and the American Revolution witnessed the rise and fall of a vast body of execution literature - last dying speeches and confessions, criminal trials and biographies - featuring the criminal as an Everyman (or Everywoman) holding up a mirror to the sins of his readers. The popularity of such publications reflected the widespread, and persistent, belief in the gallows as a literal preview of God's Tribunal': a sacred space in which solemn oaths, supernatural signs and, above all, courage, could trump the rulings of the secular courts. Here the condemned traitor, game highwayman, or model penitent could proclaim not only his or her innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.

Acknowledgements and Notes on Sources
Abbreviations
Preface
1. From Newgate to Tyburn: Setting the Stage
Introduction; Discretion and the 'Bloody Code';
The Tyburn Procession and Execution Ritual; Tyburn Fair: Mythology and Histioriography 2. From the Gallows to Grub Street: Last Dying Speeches and Criminal 'Lives' Introduction;Origins of Printed Last Dying Speeches;Literacy in Early Modern England;The Market for Criminal 'Lives' and Confessions 3. Everyman and the Gallows: Contemporary Explanations for Criminality Introduction;The Slippery Slope;Nature vs.Nuture;Excuses: Mental Incapacity, Necessity, Gender and Youth; The Decline of tl#Ç