For some 700 years between c.1196 and 1848, public executions were an inescapable part of the experiences of anyone living in London. In this period, the capital’s courts sentenced more people to die than in the rest of the country combined, earning it the grim nickname ‘the City of Gallows’. Hangings, burnings, boilings, and beheadings were wielded as a way to protect London’s ever-expanding population, to deter crime and rebellion, and to show justice being viscerally, visually done – but they also hammered home the power of the Crown, Church, and State over the lives and deaths of ordinary citizens. By the late 18th century, the notorious ‘Bloody Code’ listed over 200 capital crimes, encompassing undeniably serious offences as well as many that today would be seen as minor misdemeanours or are no longer illegal.
This legacy is still embedded in the capital’s landscape: within central London, you are never more than 5km from a former place of public execution, while in the City that distance reduces to 500m. At the Museum of London Docklands, a new exhibition traces the social history behind the scenes that these sites witnessed, and how they helped to shape the capital’s story. This might sound like a morbid subject to put on display, but the emphasis of Executions is firmly on human experiences – those who were executed or reprieved, those who made their living from associated trades, and those who campaigned for prison reform and for the abolition of capital punishment altogether.
While some of the people who were publicly put to death within the city are well known – William Wallace (1305), Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters (1606), Charles I (1649) – many others are far more obscure or have been lost to history altogether. It is thought that tens of thousands of people were condemned to death in the seven centuries that the exhibition covers, but their names were not consistently recorded prior to the 18th century. Extensive research that features in the exhibition has pulled together 5,000 cases, however, which appear as a scrolling list documenting each individual’s name, sex, crime, and place of execution. The offences for which they were convicted vary widely – including picking pockets, shoplifting, burglary, murder, rape, and arson – highlighting the broad scope of the law code of this period. Some of those included are strikingly young – while standing before the list, I saw an entry for Elizabeth Mason, who was executed for murder in 1712 at the age of 14.
