It’s August 3rd, 1832. We’re in Durham. William Jobling stands on a scaffold with a noose around his neck. He’s 30 years old and a minor from Jarrow. Until today, he has been on strike for nearly 9 months. Now, none of that matters. In just a few short minutes, he will be dead, executed for a crime he probably didn’t even commit. But the state doesn’t care.
They need Jobling to send a message to the miners. And to do that, they will make sure that his death is not the end of his punishment. In fact, it is just the beginning. From somewhere in the crowd below, a voice cuts through the noise.
“Farewell, Jobling.”
His head swivels just for a moment. The rope shifts around his neck. At that moment, the trap door opens beneath his feet. And instead of a quick death, Jobling strangles slowly. After waiting the customary hour, the executioner cuts him down. But they don’t bury him. Instead, Jobling’s corpse is carried back inside the local jail, stripped naked and coated in hot pitch until he’s as black as coal. The blacksmith then arrives with an iron cage custom-made to Jobling’s measurements and begins riveting metal bands around his limbs and twisted neck. 3 days later, his tarred body will be paraded through the streets by hundreds of armed soldiers and hoisted 21 ft into the air at Jarrow Slake, where he’ll hang in chains until he rots to the bone.
But here’s the surprising twist. His gibbeting, this grotesque punishment reserved for the worst crimes in Britain, would backfire on the state and ultimately help to end the practice forever. This is the grim history of the gibbet, one of the most macabre punishments in British legal history. We’re going to explore what it was and why the state thought that displaying rotting corpses in iron cages would prevent crime. We’ll see how it often had the opposite effect, turning executions into carnivals and criminals into folk heroes. We’ll also see how William Jobling’s case along with one spectacular disaster in Leicester brought the entire practice crashing down in the space of a single month in 1832.
Welcome to Raw History. So what exactly was a gibbet? The word itself could refer to the wooden scaffold used for hanging. But gibbeting, or hanging in chains, meant something more specific and sinister. After execution, usually by hanging, a criminal’s body was placed in a custom-made iron cage and suspended in a public place. The corpse was left there to decompose in full view, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. The legal framework came from the Murder Act in 1752. Parliament, convinced that ordinary hangings had lost their power to deter crime, mandated that convicted murderers’ bodies could no longer be buried. Instead, judges had to choose: either send the corpse for dissection or send it to the gibbet. Both options were designed as a “further terror and peculiar mark of infamy.”
The gibbet was purely spectacular, a punishment that existed only to be seen, and in theory, it was meant to work. But the reality of the gibbet was far more complex than the state intended. There was the sound first of all, iron chains that would clank and creak in the wind, sometimes audible for miles. There was also the smell. Despite the waterproofing from the tar and pitch, decomposition was inevitable. In warm weather, the stench could be unbearable. In 1735, residents of Turnham Green successfully petitioned the removal of a gibbet due to the great annoyance from the smell. And finally, there was the sight, the grotesque transformation of human form as flesh shrank from bone. Later, writer Elizabeth Ham, traveling in Ireland, recorded a similar horror, watching as her daughter Mary peered through the glass at the tarred body swinging in its iron cage and tried to work out which bit had been its face.
Gibbets were cited strategically for maximum visibility. They were placed at crossroads, on hilltops, or along busy highways, and at tidal mudflats. For pirates, for example, the location was particularly symbolic. In one example, Captain William Kidd, one of history’s most infamous pirates, was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping in 1701. His body was then coated in tar and hung in chains at Tilbury Point on the Thames’ estuary where it remained for years. Some gibbets endured for decades. The body of Spencer Broughton, an infamous highwayman, hung on the Attercliffe Common for 36 years. The economics of the gibbet were also surprising. Each cage was bespoke to its user, crafted by a local blacksmith who often had no experience of creating a gibbet cage. The average cost was £16, a year’s wages for an agricultural laborer. Some cost far more. One example from 1790, the gibbet of a man named John Dean in Middlesex, cost over £56. This expense alone would limit how often the state could use this particular punishment.
The gibbet was supposed to inspire fear and submission. Instead, it often became a curiosity, a landmark, even a carnival. When two murderers named Conaway and Richardson were gibbeted in London in 1770, the General Evening Post reported:
“The place where Conway and Richardson hang in chains still continues a particular fair. A booth is erected and several kinds of diversions carried on even under the gallows.”
One man is even reported to have climbed up the pole with two lit pipes of tobacco, stuck one in Conaway’s decaying mouth, sat across the gibbet, smoking the other, and then announced to the crowd that they’d smoked together before and would again. Gibbets also became landmarks. Streets were named after them. They appeared as reference points in travel directions. And far from preventing crime, some gibbets seemed to inspire it. In one bizarre documented case, a 16-year-old girl invited a friend to a picnic beneath a gibbet, then poisoned her with cake because the woman had been offered a job that she coveted.
In the early 19th century, the state was beginning to lose control of this particular punishment. And nowhere would this become clearer than in the case of William Jobling. To understand why Jobling’s gibbeting mattered, though, we need to understand the context. The year was 1832, and the Northeast coal fields were in revolt. Miners were striking against the bond system, a contract that bound them to a single colliery for a year at a time. The strikes were well organized, massive, and terrifying to the colliery owners and magistrates who depended on cheap controlled labor. On June 11th, 1832, a 71-year-old magistrate and colliery owner named Nicholas Fairless was riding near Jarrow Slake when two miners stopped him. One was William Jobling. The other was a man named Ralph Armstrong.
What happened next is disputed and we may never know the truth. The prosecution claimed that Armstrong held Fairless in place whilst Jobling beat the old man to death with a stone and his own walking stick. Jobling’s version, however, was different. He’d stopped Fairless to beg for money or a drink. Desperate from weeks without pay when Armstrong attacked, Jobling panicked. He claimed that while he did not strike a single blow on Fairless, he did hold his horse. But under the law of common purpose, that was enough. Armstrong fled and was never captured. Jobling, however, stayed but was arrested. He was tried and convicted. The state had its scapegoat. Mr. Justice Park, residing at the Durham Assizes, needed to send a message to these striking miners. The Anatomy Act had just abolished punitive dissection. But Park, either confused by the new law or simply determined to use the harshest punishment available, sentenced Jobling to be hanged and then hung in chains.
It was a political execution designed to break the miner’s spirit and send a message. It had the opposite effect. The mining community didn’t see Jobling as a murderer. They saw him as one of their own, sacrificed by the state, desperate to maintain control. Folk songs even began to circulate even before the execution. The ballad written days later, “Farewell Jobling,” captured the community’s view:
“Farewell Jobling,” rang the shout from the crowd as he was launched into the eternity, and on Jarrow’s slake gibbeted 21 ft high, he was hung to rot in the hot summer sky.
William Jobling, a literate man, a scapegoat, and an innocent victim. The miners weren’t afraid, they were angry, and they were already planning something the state did not expect. After death, his body was taken to the jail, stripped and coated in pitch. Jobling was then riveted into an iron cage around his limbs. The gibbet cage itself was a marvel of grim engineering: vertical bands up the legs and torso, horizontal hoops across the chest and hip, and a headpiece to keep the skull upright. Some even included a nose guard to prevent the face from collapsing. There were also stirrups to support the feet, all suspended from a swivel hook that would let the body rotate in the wind.
On August 6th, 3 days after the execution, the procession left Durham. Jobling’s corpse lay on a cart surrounded by a troop of the Eighth Hussars and two companies of the 15th Regiment of Foot. The authorities knew exactly how the mining community felt about Jobling’s execution, and they were taking no chances. The gibbet was erected near Jarrow Slake, a tidal mudflat near where Fairless had been killed. The post stood 21 ft high, sunk into a stone base, weighing a ton and a half to prevent anyone from digging it up. Jobling’s body swung high above the exposed mudflat, visible for miles in every direction, and visible from one place in particular, the cottage where Isabella Jobling lived with her children. From her window she could see her husband every single day, hanging, rotting, the iron chains clanking in the wind. The smell, when the breeze shifted, was unbearable.
The night of August 31st, 1832, less than a month after Jobling’s body was hoisted into the air, the gibbet stood alone in the darkness, unguarded. Under the cover of night, men began to arrive. They scaled the 21 ft post. They removed the iron cage. They carried William Jobling’s body away into the darkness. No one ever informed on the thieves, though, and no body was ever officially recovered. Local folklore suggests that it might have been buried secretly in Jarrow’s churchyard, or perhaps near the Willington Quay. The empty gibbet remained standing for a time, but it was no longer a monument to state power. It was a monument to the state’s failure.
The theft of Jobling’s body sent shock waves through the British government. The punishment designed to terrify the miners had instead unified them. The state had been humiliated, and much worse was coming. Just one week after Jobling’s execution, on August 10th, 1832, a 21-year-old bookbinder named James Cook was hanged in Leicester. Cook had murdered a man called John Pass, a brass instrument maker from London following a dispute over debt. His method of disposal was particularly grim. He tried to burn the body in his workshop furnace, dismembering it first. The discovery of the charred remains caused a national sensation. Just like Jobling, Cook was ordered to be hung in chains. His body was suspended from a 33 ft gibbet at Saffron Lane near the Alston Tollgate at the edge of Leicester.
The authorities intended to create a solemn deterrent, a spectacle. What they got was complete chaos. On the first day, Sunday after the gibbet was erected, somewhere between 20 and 40,000 people are reported to have descended on Saffron Lane. Vendors set up stalls to sell food and ale. People climbed the gibbet post to get a better look at Cook’s face. Children ran through the crowds. The atmosphere was of a county fair, not a place of judicial terror. The local gentry were horrified, not at the cruelty of the punishment, but at the disorder it had created. They petitioned the authorities immediately. The reaction was unprecedented. On Tuesday, August 14th, just 3 days after the gibbet was first erected, an order arrived from the Home Office:
“Take it down immediately.”
Cook’s body was removed and buried at the foot of his gibbet post, iron cage and all. The final gibbet in England lasted just 3 days before the government, humiliated and outraged, ordered its removal. The practice designed to inspire terror had thrown one of the largest parties that Leicester had seen in years and encouraged more crime to boot. Combined with the theft of Jobling’s body just weeks earlier, the message was clear and unmistakable. The gibbet had failed.
The disasters of August 1832 made abolition inevitable. And two years later in March 1834, William Ewart, the MP for Liverpool, introduced a bill to abolish gibbeting for good. He described it as “odious and unsullied to the present state of public feeling.” Later that year, Lord Suffield championed the cause in the House of Lords. In his speech on July 18th, 1834, Suffield pointed directly to Cook and Jobling as proof that the punishment had failed. He asked the lords to expunge it forever from the statute book. On July 25th, 1834, the Hanging in Chains Act received royal assent. The practice was formally abolished. Bodies of murderers would now be buried within prison precincts, hidden, private, and unmourned. The era of spectacular public punishment was over in Great Britain.
William Jobling’s widow, Isabella, sadly never recovered from what she witnessed. She died in the Harton Workhouse in 1892, aged 91. Jobling’s gibbeting was intended to restore authority, but instead his body was stolen. In Leicester, Cook’s gibbet collapsed into carnival chaos. Together, these events exposed a punishment that no longer served any purpose. In 1834, hanging in chains was abolished. The gibbets came down across Britain and William Jobling, a scapegoat, a symbol, innocent, was in some small way vindicated.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
