The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868

Abstract

This social history explores how the English people felt about public execution during its heyday. Drawing on letters, diaries, ballads and other documentation of the time, it analyzes responses to the scaffold at all social levels: from the crowds who gathered to watch executions; to the literary commentators such as Boswell and Byron; to judges, politicians and monarchs who decided who should die and who should be reprieved. The text also surveys the changing attitudes towards death and suffering, and demonstrates that the retreat from public hanging owed less to the growth of humane sensibilities than it did to the development of new methods of punishment and law enforcement, and the public's deepening fear of the scaffold crowd.