Gone Medieval - Executions in Medieval London

Episode Date: November 12, 2022

Public executions were a major part of Londoners’ lives from the 12th century right through to the 19th. Now the Museum of London Docklands has brought the rarely told and often tragic human stories behind these events to a superb new exhibition, containing a range of fascinating objects, paintings and projections, many of which have rarely been seen in public.In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis explores some of the exhibition’s Medieval stories and items with curator Meriel Jeater.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Rob Weinberg. **WARNING: This episode contains graphic descriptions of methods of execution**Find out more about the Executions exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands, here >For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Lots of stories of prominent medieval figures end at a gallows or on an Axman's block. These events served a number of purposes and became macabre tourist attractions. A new exhibition at the Museum of London, Docklands, tells the story of public executions from the first named individual in the medieval period

to the reform movement of the 19th century. I headed down to take a look and to speak to Merrill, one of the curators of the exhibition. Thank you very much for joining us here today, Merriol. It's a pleasure. Very excited to have a look around this exhibition. Yes. Can you start off by telling us when public executions

start being recorded taking place in London? Public executions have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, but the first named person that we know of who was publicly executed was William Fitz Osberg in 1196 and he was drawn, hanged and quartered for treason. That's a pretty spectacular start. Yeah, and I think that's probably why he's one of the first people to be recorded and named because he had this very dramatic and excruciating death. Do you know what he'd done?

He had encouraged a kind of uprising of... the poor against the rich. It was a time of high taxation, and there was a lot of tension around that. So he sort of encouraged people to rise up. He'd taken shelter in St Mary Leboe Church in London, intending to sort of make a stand there, and they burnt part of the church down to smoke him out, and then he was arrested, and eventually executed. And is that the first record we have of someone being hanged, drawn and quartered,

or drawn hang and quartered, as I'm noticing it says on the wall behind me? Yes, drawn, hanged and courted, yeah. I think it is. And it's this sort of punishment that loads various different methods into it. So it's almost like you're dying several times because of what was perceived as the severity of your crime. Public executions then carry on through London. What do you think is the main reason that they're made such a public spectacle of? Is it to discourage people from committing the crime?

Is it to increase the levels of punishment? Is it entertainment? I think there's a lot of reasons going on. So one is exactly what you say. It's aimed to be a deterrent. It's the state showing this is what will happen to you if you break these laws. And there are certain laws like against treason,

which are the punishment for that is incredibly severe. So, yeah, it's the state making an example of people. It's a deterrent. It's also almost like a proof of what's happened. So you can say this person has definitely been killed because thousands of people have witnessed it. But it's a risky thing to do for the state as well because it risks making a martyr of somebody. If the crowd doesn't believe that it's right that this person's been executed, it can really turn people's view against the monarch or the state and the government.

Interesting. And does the fact that this is the first recorded execution in London, mean that it was the first or does it suggest that it was happening before that it's just not well recorded? I think there are executions that are recorded beforehand but without named people, the records are just not as clear. So this is the time where we'll get much more detail about who was executed and what happened to them. Fascinating. So if we start with the most gruesome form of execution that we've just talked about, what does that actually involve? We tend to say hung, drawn and quartered. Why have we got that the wrong way around? Why is it drawn hung and quartered?

I'm not sure why it's sort of said the wrong way around, and maybe because it rolls off the tongue better, but you're drawn, so you are taken from the place where you're being held prisoner to the place of execution, and so the person could be tied to the back of a horse and dragged through the streets. Though what could happen in that circumstance

is that they might die en route, because it's obviously completely horrendous to be dragged in that way. So they end up dragging people on hurdles or wooden boards, or so on to sort of preserve them until they get to their location of execution, and then they'll be hanged until they're nearly dead, and then taken off the gallows and often disembowls,

then their organs pulled out. Sometimes the organs are burnt next to them, and then they will often be cut into quarters, and those quarters can be taken around to different cities, and displayed in public places. Again, it's a warning and a deterrent, what will happen to you if you commit treason. Pretty horrendous thing to go through, but I guess that's the point.

But it sounds like there's a degree of, dare I say, skill involved in doing this. There's plenty of opportunities to get it wrong and kill someone before they're supposed to die. They could, as you say, be killed, being drawn to the place. If you get the hanging bit wrong, was it kind of a skilled job to do this? There are a lot of instances of bungled executions. And people didn't really want to be the executioner. and later on in history, executions have this reputation as kind of hated figures

and boogeymen that you will terrify your children about. So I don't think it went in a straightforward manner a lot of the time. Fascinating. And what can people expect to see when they come and have a wonder around this exhibition? Well, so the exhibition is split into different chapters or sections. So the first part deals with the different methods that were used to execute people. So hanging, drawing and quartering, as we've talked about. Hanging was probably the most common way of executing somebody for all kinds of crimes.

If you were a noble and had committed treason, because of your nobility, you would often have your sentence commuted to beheading instead. So you don't have to go through that humiliation of the whole kind of evisceration. And sometimes, you know, during the quartering process, people were castrated and things like that. So it's like there's a huge dishonour and sort of disfigurement to the body. So, yeah, in the kind of recognition of people's noble status, they were often just simply beheaded. But even that could go wrong. Yeah, there are accounts of that going fairly horrendously wrong.

I'm looking at the illustration of the hanging as we're walking past. Yeah. I notice it's on a cart and kind of the cart being moved out the way so the people are dangling. So it's not in the medieval period, that long drop execution that breaks your neck. No, this time it would be the huge. short drop method so you would be suspended from a gallows and you would either be stood on a cart and then the cart draws away from you and you're sort of left dangling and you're basically strangled by your own body weight and it takes quite a long time to do it you know several minutes

and very very agonising or sometimes people would be made to climb a ladder and then the executioner would push them off the ladder so that's another method so yeah hanging was the sort of most common method of execution. We also have burning and in the medieval period burning could be used as a method of execution for people who committed arson but then by the 15th century an act of parliament gets passed where burning becomes the method of execution for people who are heretics so they've questioned the teachings of the church and an example is meant to be made of them by this particularly horrible horrible method of execution. So you have people like the Lollards and so on being burnt at stake.

And then, of course, in the Reims of Henry VIII and his children, a lot of people are put to death in this way because they're on the wrong side of the current religion so that either they're Protestant or they're Catholic at the wrong time. So we've got prints of people being burnt here at Smithfield. And it's interesting, I mean, arson, burning someone for arson, I guess there's an element of that punishment fitting the crime or appearing to fit the crime.

Sure, yeah. And is it the case that that was also the kind of version of execution used for women? Well, yes. So women who committed treason wouldn't get drawn, hanged and watered. They would be burnt. And treason for women included murder of their husbands because it was seen as betraying somebody who's your superior. And also coinage crimes.

So if you're, you know, clipping coins, that's the kind of treasonry. against the king or the monarch. So women would be burnt. And right up into the 18th century, there are cases of women who were burnt. And in the 18th century, they were meant to be strangled first and then burnt when they were dead.

It was fairly late on in the 18th century with the last woman to be burnt for, I think it was coinage crimes. Yeah. Probably as a longer history than people imagine. You think of it being quite a brutal medieval thing to do, using medieval as a pejorative word. But you tend to think it's that kind of period

and it disappeared. Do we know when the last public executions were of the other kinds, so the last beheadings and hangings? The last beheadings were in 1820 and then the last hanging in public was 1868. So you mentioned the image of someone being burnt at Smithfield. Were particular places associated with execution or different kinds of execution? Or did it relate to where you committed your crime? It's a real variety. So that actually brings us very neatly on to.

the next section of the exhibition, which is called City of Gallows, and that's about the landscape of execution in London. And there were many, many places where people were executed in London. There were common places like Tyburn, Smithfield, Tower Hill, where regular executions were carried out, but also, as you said, you could be executed on or near the spot of your crime as well. And that was often to discourage local people from doing the same thing, or for there to be a feeling that local people could witness justice being carried out for somebody who'd committed a crime in their area.

Yeah, they could see justice being delivered in the place where the crime had been committed. Exactly, yeah. Although I'm not sure, I think I read the brochure for the exhibition, and there's talk of one guy who didn't want the execution to take place outside his house. Yes, yes. Because why would you want someone executed on your doorstep? I think he didn't want this notoriety of it taking place outside his shop. It would have been awful.

And so are there places that people can visit today that, as grim as it is, are associated with execution? So we've got Smithfield, Tyburn, Newgate, Horsemonger Lane. I mean, these are places that still exist in London today. Yes. How close can we get to the spots where these things were taking place in public? Smithfield is a great example of that because they are memorials on St. Bart's Hospital in Smithfield to people who were executed there. So martyrs who died for their religion and were burned to the stake at Smithfield, there's a plaque in their memory.

There's a plaque in memory of William Wallace, who was drawn and quartered at Smithfield. And people regularly go there and they leave flowers and so on. So these are kind of active memorial places. And at Tyburn, there's a traffic island, basically, in the middle of the road at Marble Arch. And on there you'll see three oak trees and a plaque on the pavement. And that's symbolic of the gallows at Tyburn, the famous triple tree gallows. It was the sort of triangular gallows that were there. And again, people do visit there and say prayers in memory of the dead.

Was that triple tree at Tyburn ever three trees? Probably originally people were hanged from trees. So, yeah, Tyburn was a very rural area earlier on in its history. So there would have been trees there. And in fact, Smithfield as well, there was a bit of Smithfield called the Elms. and there may have been elm trees there where people were hanged. Newgate Prison is fairly famous. Is being executed at Newgate related to the prison being there?

Yes. So Tyburn ends as a place of execution in 1783, and executions are moved outside Newgate prison. So what it means is condemned prisoners who are being held at Newgate, they can walk out onto the scaffold directly outside the prison and be executed there. whereas before prisoners from Newgate were processed through the streets of London out to Tyburn and thousands of people would come and watch it was a concern over crowd control crime traffic congestion all sorts of things and people having taken the day off to watch

it's terrifying how much it's like a football match today well yeah I mean there's a big crowd mentality and people would sometimes cheer popular criminals and throw flowers to them and sort of shouts and messages of encouragement as they went after the gallows and then people that were particularly hated who'd done crimes that were very very disapproved of could have stones thrown at them dirt chucked at them people would swear and shout awful things so yeah it really did depend on the the crime, the sort of treatment that they would get by the crowd on their way to Tyburn. And of course, eventually the authorities are very concerned about that. And the people who live in the Tyburn area, by the mid-18th century, it's becoming very gentrified.

And they don't want the disruption of this taking place several times a year outside their house. 18th century, Nimbieism. And I guess Tower Hill is one of the more famous places, or at least where some famous people were frequently executed. Yes. Again, is that just related to it being so close to the Tower of London where lots of these people were held prisoner? Or is there an element of it being a suitable place for a public execution of someone important? I think it's a bit of both. So we've got this print here where you can see a map of the Tower of London and Tower Hill outside it. And you can see this little bit where it's this the posts of the scaffold. So executions there were regular enough for that to be in situ.

you. Certain people were executed inside the grounds of the Tower of London and we don't really discuss them in this exhibition because they weren't really in public. It would be in front of an invited. It feels odd to say audience. Yeah, witnesses. Yes. Whereas outside you could have people who were thinking about in the 18th century people like Jacobite rebels were beheaded on Tower Hill and so on. So yeah, 1388 was the first instance. that we know of of somebody being beheaded outside on Tower Hill. There's a lot of space around it,

so you can fit quite a lot of people in as witnesses and then the crowd. There are instances that I learned about in the research of this exhibition that I didn't realise of people being executed at Tower Hill. So, for example, in the 13th century, a lot of Jewish people were executed for coinage crimes just outside the Tower of London. And coinage crimes were rife at this time. clip the edges of coins very easily and take the metal and making something else.

And both Jews and Christians committed coinage crimes, but a lot more Jews than Christians were actually executed because of the religious prejudices of the time. So we've got a little bit about that in the exhibition and an example of a clipped coin. My understanding is that's why coins, even today, have got those little dots around the edge so that you can't clip coins or at least you can see where the edge of the coin should be. cutting currency was legal. You could, a half penny was halving a penny. But it's the practice of clipping bits around the edge

to make more coins or to turn the silver into something else. Yeah. That's the problem, I guess. And this particular type of coin, the short cross penny, the cross is in the centre and then you've got the legend around the edge. And it makes it a bit less obvious when you've clipped the edges and then they change the design. So it's the long cross penny.

So the cross goes all the way to the edge. So it should be more easy to see. if it's been clipped or not. It's strange that executions for sniffing a bit of metal off the edge of a coin aren't far different to ones for planning to kill the king. I suppose you're facing the coinage of the realm and so on. Yeah. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts

and they were designed to be reused? Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a new podcast from History. where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons, or sex ed. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods, from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages,

to Renaissance and early modern, right up to now. Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheet Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned with particularly things like they're being drawn, hung and quartered, the bodies were cut up. What would happen to them then? I guess they're displayed in various places, but what's the point of doing that? It's as a deterrent and a real statement about what will happen to you. If you commit treasons around here, we've got a Prince of London Bridge.

This is from the 17th century, but the practice of displaying the heads of executed people on London Bridge goes all the way back to 1305. So the first recorded person to have their head displayed on London Bridge is William. Wallace. So if you're coming to London from the south, you almost have to cross London Bridge to get over to the city of London in the north. And so thousands of people would be walking underneath this gatehouse at the front of London Bridge seeing these heads and it was meant to be a warning. Behave yourselves. Otherwise, this is what will happen to you. A pretty gruesome display. And again, I guess William Wallace being the first recorded case of this, might well suggest it was already going on anyway. He's just a

famous person who this was done to. Yeah, quite possibly, yeah. And other body parts were taken off to other cities around the country and displayed on the city gates, or they could be displayed on the city gates of London as well. So you might have an arm or a leg, and people would know who it was, and they could point it out to you. Yeah, pretty terrifying. Yeah. And so if people come to visit this exhibition, which they definitely should, it looks fantastic. There's lots of stuff that's outside our medieval period, unfortunately. There is. Lots about the execution of Charles I first. Punch and Judy is part of Gallo's culture. I'm of a generation where we still associate that with the seaside. Yeah. And watching a Punch and Judy show while all the children laugh

without understanding that it's about domestic violence and justice and execution. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the jokes in inverted commas of the Punch and Judy shows that Punch is due to be executed and he tricks the executioner into putting his own head into the noose and the executioner gets hanged. So the crowds of London would be very familiar with these kinds of stories and this gallows culture, as you say, because they could see it for real. So are there any good medieval items or stories that are included in the exhibition? We do have, in the next couple of sections, we've got a skeleton of a medieval man who was beheaded, actually. So we have to show you. Sir Simon Burley, we think Sir Simon Burley, we won't ever know for sure.

And he was beheaded for treason and buried at the Abbey of St Mary Grace's next to the Tower of London. And archaeologists back in the 1980s doing the excavation of that site. And he's the only skeleton that they found on the site who had signs that they were beheaded. So that's why we presume that it's him. And his fifth serve of core vertebrae has been sliced through. It's sort of very straight and polished, probably from an axe or a sword going through his neck. And obviously we don't have his head because that would have been taken away and displayed on London Bridge, I think. So when was Sir Simon Burley executed, do we know?

It was 1388. So he was our favourite of Richard II. And other nobles at the time were very resentful of his power and the influence that he had over the king. and they convinced the king that he had to be executed and the queen actually bent on her knees for his life so please don't execute him but it was forced through and he was made an example of do the marks on the vertebrae suggest that it was a clean execution

it does yeah seem as if it went straight through yeah not sort of multiple marks from a blade or anything which would suggest something much more painful painful. Yeah. Sounds like a small mercy, but you hear of plenty of people being repeatedly hacked and botched. Oh yes, absolutely. And also his skeleton's interesting.

We can see that he's got a healed injury on his ribs and his left elbow, possibly from a accident, perhaps he fell off a horse when he was younger. And our bio-archology team tell me that this person is quite a robust, strong individual from looking at the bones. You know, he was a knight. He would have been enacted. an active fighter and so we can't be certain but every chance that's the remains of an executed man from the 14th century yeah we don't have the actual human remains in the exhibition but we have

studied some remains of skulls that were found at highburn around the site of the gallows in 1961 when they were building the pedestrian underpasses at marble arch Archaeologists were able to go down at various points in the day and record what the workmen were finding and you can see this is a map drawn at the time in the 1960s and they found skeletons that were buried around the foot of the gallows and one of them had some shackles around their ankles and these are the shackles

and yes we've got some of these human remains in our collection that we care for them and we did some analysis and we did carbon 14 dating on them and some isotopic analysis as well, looking at the chemicals in their teeth to find out where they might have been born. And it turned out surprisingly that quite a lot of these jawbones were people from the medieval period. For some reason, when I saw them, I just assumed that they would be 18th century, but a lot of them were earlier. This guy is 17th century.

So 1285 to 1414, the radiocarbon date that came out from this person's. And so someone who grew up in the Greater London area, so a local, presumably hung for a crime at Tyburn, and then is body buried on the site of the execution as well? Yes, so if you didn't have friends and families to take your body away, they would often either bury you at the foot of the gallows. There are written descriptions of people being tipped into pits at Tyburn, or if you did have people around who could care for your body afterwards, they could take you away and you'd be buried in your local parish church.

So yeah, these jawbones have been analysed and we can tell things about people's health and so from looking at them. So you can use the touchscreen and explore them all and find out about people's tooth decay. Yeah. And I guess an ultimate final sadness, if nobody's there to look after your body after the execution and you're just rolled into a pit, even if you were a criminal. It seems very harsh. And so as we've mentioned, you know, there is a fair bit that's beyond the medieval period.

Yeah. What's your favourite thing that's outside the medieval period? period that we haven't been able to talk about that you think people should come and see? Well, we've got a case here about mourning the loss of people who were executed and about the impact of those executions on families and loved ones. And one of my favourite objects in the exhibition is this bed sheet. And it belonged to a man called James Radcliffe who was executed for treason in 1716. and he was held at the Tower of London for four months and his wife lived with him at the tower.

So they would have slept underneath the sheet together. And then once he died, she held onto the sheet and she embroidered it really, really beautifully. And she also embroidered it with these words in human hair. And there are two different colours of human hair. So we think it's possibly that she's sort of entwined to her own hair with that of her husband. She did take lots of his hair afterwards as Plymitos. And it says, the sheet off my dear, dear lord's bed in the Wretched Tower of London, February 1716,

and she signed it, and Countess of Dura Waters. It's just incredibly moving to me. She mourned him for years after his death, and these objects were really important for her, and she would have perhaps found some solace in her grief by using his and her hair to make this embroidery. Such a fascinating story. Absolutely fascinating.

Well, I mean, it's an incredibly well set out exhibition, but very moving as well, I think. There's parts of it that really drive home the terror and the fear and the horror of some of these things, but also the public spectacle that it became as well. It was almost entertainment for the crowd and what that says about people who were making an effort to go and watch these displays of brutality.

So I definitely recommend people to come down and have a look around. Thank you very much for your time. Oh, thank you. I hope you enjoyed that tour. There's plenty to see there and lots that's beyond the scope of our medieval period, as Merrill was hinting at. They have a shirt supposedly worn by Charles I at his execution, engravings and paintings of scenes of execution,

broadsides, letters, and an array of other artefacts to add depth and texture to the stories told. The exhibition is well worth a visit. It prompts so many questions about our ancestors and about mob mentality that's still around today. It runs until the 16th of April, 2023, at the Museum of London at Docklands. That's not the one at the Barbican. Don't be that person who nearly goes to the wrong branch of the museum. I mean, who would do that.

Anyway, you can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts to help new listeners to find the joys of gone medieval. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.