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November 25th, 2021 
Awake Goy The curious English have a predilection for heaping abuse upon the corpses of the unfortunate dead, including a cruel and unusual punishment the bodies of executed murderers were subject to in the 18th century, namely hanging in chains. The setting is the period running from the early years of the 18th century through to the early 19th century when English criminal law was subject to the ‘Bloody Code’. This was when there were over 220 offences for which the punishment was the death sentence – crimes which by modern standards – such as damaging the banks of canal or impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner – would be rated minor misdemeanors, punishable only by fines or the briefest of prison sentences.
Hanging cage at the main gate to Corciano, Province of Perugia, Italy ( Fradeve11/ CC BY-SA 3.0 )
Murder Act 1752
There was still however a very real concern among the governing classes, people who put the protection of their property far above the lives of the masses, that the punishments being dealt out did not have a sufficient deterrent force. This was summed up in the words of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1701. Entitled Hanging Not Punishment Enough , the writer said: “ I have observed… that tho’ there have been very frequent Convictions, and Executions… yet still… new ones rise in their places and their number seems not in the least diminished and this has often tempted me to think that there is still defect in our Laws .”
In response to this perceived crime wave and, coincidentally, a shortage of dead bodies available to surgeons and medical schools to practice anatomy and dissection, the English Parliament in 1751 enacted the Murder Act (often referred to as the Murder Act 1752) designed for the “ better preventing the horrid crime of murder ” because it was felt “ necessary some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death .”
The Act went on to say that “ in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be suffered to be buried ” but instead the murderer was to be subject to either public dissection or “ hanging in chains ”. Welcome to the Georgian world of post-mortem punishment!
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Charles Christian is an English barrister and Reuters correspondent turned writer,
award-winning tech journalist, and podcaster with a soft spot for history. He was born
a ‘chime child’ with a caul so, according to legend, cannot drown at sea but can see
and talk to ghosts and fairy folk without fear of coming to harm – allegedly! His latest book is
Shuckland: Weird tales, ghosts, folklore and legends from East Anglia’s Waveney valley available from [email protected]
Top Image : James Cook’s Gibbet iron at Leicester Guildhall ( NotFromUtrecht/ CC BY-SA 3.0 )
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