This Medieval Punishment Was Worse Than Death

“There is a skull in the attic of Rye Town Hall. It’s been there since the 1740s, clamped inside a rusted iron head frame, and the head frame is part of a larger iron cage, and the cage is the thing they put a man named John Breads into after they killed him for stabbing the wrong person.”

“The skull just sits up there. You can go see it. There’s a little sign, and if that doesn’t set the tone for what we’re about to get into, nothing will, because the history of gibbeting in England and its colonies is one of those subjects where every time you think you found the worst detail, there’s another one underneath it, and then another one underneath that, and eventually you’re reading about how somebody’s femur got turned into a set of nutcrackers, and you just have to accept that this is where the afternoon went.”

“Right. Quickly.”

“Gibbeting. The basic concept is straightforward enough to describe and deeply unpleasant to think about for more than a few seconds.”

“After a criminal was executed, hanged usually, their body would be coated in tar, sealed inside a custom-made iron cage, and then hung from a tall wooden post in a public location, typically near the scene of the crime or along a major road, and left there for years, sometimes decades. The body would decompose inside the cage, picked apart by crows and magpies and whatever else felt like visiting, and the whole apparatus would creak and sway in the wind on its iron swivel, and it would smell, obviously.”

“It would smell unbelievably badly, and people living nearby would close their windows when the wind shifted, and sometimes the smell was so bad that even horses refused to pass, and all of that was intentional. That was the design. The state wanted you to see it and smell it and hear it and think about your life choices. Whether it actually deterred anyone from committing crimes is historically quite debatable.”

“The evidence mostly suggests that people treated new gibbetings as a sort of grim holiday, turning up in their thousands with food and drink and children, but the state kept doing it for centuries anyway, because governments are not always good at evaluating whether their policies work, and the story of how it started and how it ended and the specific people it happened to is where we’re going today.”

“And I should say at the outset that between 1700 and 1832, something like 370 men were gibbeted across England, Wales, and Scotland.”

“That’s not counting the earlier medieval period, not counting pirates under Admiralty jurisdiction, not counting the colonies. The number is larger than most people expect. These were not vanishingly rare events.”

“If you lived in 18th century England and traveled regularly between towns, the odds of encountering a gibbet by the roadside were not trivial. The landscape was punctuated with them. If we’re going to start somewhere, we might as well start early. Gibbeting as a practice in England goes back to at least the 14th century, probably earlier, but one of the first really well-documented named cases is Robert Aske, who was hanged in chains at York in 1537.”

“Aske was a lawyer and the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was an enormous popular uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. 30,000 people marched. It was the largest rebellion Henry faced. Aske was lured to London under promise of safe conduct, arrested, tried for treason, and taken back to York to be hanged in chains from the walls of York Castle.”

“Henry wanted northern England to see what happened when you challenged him. The political dimension is important here because gibbeting was never purely about criminal justice. It was always about power, about the state sending a message, and the message was written in iron and rotting flesh, and it was placed where the most people would have to look at it.”

“The legal basis for all of this was murky for a very long time. There was no statute authorizing gibbeting until 1752. Before that, it rested on a common law understanding that the bodies of executed felons belonged to the Crown, a royal prerogative that allowed monarchs and judges to order postmortem display, essentially whenever they felt like it.”

“William Harrison, writing in 1577, described how murderers were either hanged alive in chains near the place where the act was committed, or if someone took pity, strangled first. That phrase, ‘hanged alive in chains,’ is doing a lot of work there, and we should acknowledge it. In some early cases, the person wasn’t dead when they went into the cage.”

“They died of exposure, thirst, starvation, hanging up there in the weather. That practice largely disappeared in England by the 17th century, but it persisted in the colonies, and we’ll come back to that. The practice actually peaked before it was formally written into law, and the peak came because of smugglers.”

“Between about 1747 and 1752, there was a ferocious campaign against the Hawkhurst gang, which was a violent smuggling network operating across Sussex and Kent. These weren’t lovable rogues running a bit of brandy past the customs men. The Hawkhurst gang tortured and murdered revenue officers, intimidated witnesses, and essentially ran parts of the southern coast as a criminal state.”

“Of the 75 gang members who were eventually caught and convicted, 14 were gibbeted. 14. Their bodies were distributed across the landscape of Sussex and Kent like a network of warnings, placed at crossroads and hilltops and harbor approaches, so that wherever you went in that part of England, you’d eventually come across one of them hanging there.”

“The names we have include John Cook and Richard Ashcroft gibbeted at Shepherd’s Bush in 1747 and Thomas Kingsmill and William Fairall and Richard Mapstone who were gibbeted near Hawkhurst after being executed at Tyburn. The worst cases came from the Chichester Assizes of 1749 where John Copy, John Hammond, William Carter, and Benjamin Tapner were gibbeted for the murders of Daniel Chater and William Galley.”

“Those murders were so brutal that describing them in detail would be its own video and not a pleasant one. Chater was a witness who had been asked to testify against the gang and Galley was the customs officer escorting him and the gang intercepted them on the road and subjected them to prolonged torture over several days before killing them both.”

“The trial was a landmark moment in the suppression of organized smuggling in Southern England and there’s a detail from the Chichester trial that tells you something about the psychological reality of this punishment. One of the accused, a man named Jackson, dropped dead in the dock upon hearing he was to be hung in chains.”

“Just died right there in the courtroom. They threw his body in a hole at the gallows. The fear of gibbeting was, for at least one person, literally fatal. Whether it was a heart attack or a stroke or some kind of shock response, nobody at the time investigated. He was dead. He was a criminal. They put him in the ground and moved on to the next case.”

“All of this was happening without any specific statute, but in 1752, Parliament decided to formalize things, and the result was the Murder Act. The background was a press-driven moral panic about homicide in London. Newspapers were running story after story about murders, the public was alarmed, and in February 1752, a House of Commons Committee was established specifically to address it.”

“Sir William Yonge and Sir George Littleton were ordered to bring a bill for the better preventing the horrid crime of murder. The bill moved through Parliament in under 6 weeks, which by 18th century standards is practically sprinting, and received royal assent from George II on March 26th, 1752. The preamble is worth pausing on because the language tells you how they were thinking about this.”

“It said that the horrid crime of murder has of late been more frequently perpetrated than formerly, and that some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death. Some further terror. They already had the death penalty, and they wanted to add something extra, something worse than dying, something that happened to you after you were already dead.”

“The act mandated that no murderer’s body could be buried without first being either publicly dissected by anatomists or hung in chains. Those were the two options, dissection or gibbeting. The judge decided which. The judges themselves then met in May 1752 and decided by narrow majority that dissection would be the default sentence pronounced in court, while gibbeting would be reserved for cases where the judge issued a separate special order to the sheriff.”

“It’s a bureaucratic detail, but it matters because it meant gibbeting required an extra step, an active decision by the judge that this particular criminal was so bad that ordinary death and ordinary dissection weren’t enough. In practice, about 80% got dissection and roughly 12% fewer than two people per year got hung in chains. The remaining 8% received pardons.”

“Between 1752 and 1832, about 1,394 people were capitally convicted of murder under the act in England and Wales. Of those, 134 were gibbeted, 22 more in Scotland, and separately from the Murder Act, the Admiralty had its own jurisdiction. Pirates, smugglers, and mutineers could be gibbeted under maritime law, entirely independently of the murder statute, and property criminals convicted of highway robbery and mail robbery could also be gibbeted at judicial discretion.”

“The Murder Act didn’t create gibbeting so much as systematize something that had been happening for centuries and would keep happening in various forms for another 80 years. Which brings us to Captain Kidd, probably the most famous gibbeting in English history and a case that’s considerably more complicated than the pirate story version most people know.”

“William Kidd was born around 1645 in Dundee, Scotland. He was originally a legitimate privateer. He had royal letters from the Earl of Bellomont authorizing him to hunt pirates in the Indian Ocean. He sailed from Deptford in September 1696 aboard the Adventure Galley. The voyage went badly from the start. His crew was devastated by cholera, his ship leaked, and he couldn’t find any pirates to capture.”

“Under pressure from a restless and increasingly mutinous crew, Kidd crossed the line. He murdered his gunner William Moore by hitting him in the head with an iron bucket, a wooden bucket with iron hoops to be precise, and Moore died the next day. And then he captured a ship called the Quedagh Merchant, which was carrying satins, muslins, gold, and silver.”

“He’d become the thing he was supposed to be hunting. He sailed back to the Americas hoping his political patrons would protect him, but they didn’t, and he was arrested in Boston in July 1699 and shipped to England. His trial at the Old Bailey in May 1701 was, by most historical assessments, not entirely fair. French passes that might have provided a legal defense for some of his captures mysteriously vanished before the trial.”

“They were later found in government archives long after it mattered. Several historians have argued that Kidd’s powerful backers, including members of the Whig government who had originally funded his expedition, needed him silenced before he could publicly implicate them in piracy for profit. He was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy.”

“On the 23rd of May, 1701, they hanged him at Execution Dock in Wapping, and the rope broke on the first attempt. Kidd, who was reportedly drunk, had to be hauled back up the scaffold and hanged again on a new rope. After that, his body was tarred, sealed in a gibbet cage, and hung at Tilbury Point on the lower Thames, where it remained for 3 years.”

“Every ship entering or leaving London’s port would pass Kidd’s body. Thousands of sailors saw it. That was entirely intentional. The Admiralty wanted every mariner on the river to see what happened to pirates, and Kidd became the image, the archetype, of pirate justice. When Dickens puts a gibbet in the opening of Great Expectations, when Pip sees the other, a gibbet with some chains hanging to it, which had once held a pirate, that’s the cultural memory of Kidd and the dozens of pirates who were treated the same way at Execution Dock and its downstream gibbet sites.”

“Execution Dock itself is worth a moment because it was a fully developed system of maritime punishment with its own rituals and its own geography. It operated for over 400 years as the Admiralty’s execution site, located in Wapping on the north bank of the Thames. Condemned men were paraded from Marshalsea Prison through the streets, led by the Admiralty Marshal carrying a silver oar that represented maritime jurisdiction.”

“The oar was the symbol of the Lord High Admiral’s authority, and its presence made the whole proceeding a performance of naval power. Pirates were hanged on a shortened rope that wouldn’t break their neck, so they’d slowly strangle. The crowd called it the marshal’s dance, that terrible twitching. After death, the body was left on the gallows until three tides had washed over it, marking the Admiralty’s jurisdiction over tidal waters.”

“Only then would it be tarred and gibbeted at prominent points downstream. Cuckold’s Point in Rotherhithe, Blackwall Point further east, and Tilbury at the mouth of the estuary. At peak periods, an old seaman later recalled, you could see numerous gibbets on the Isle of Dogs, which with here and there a bone bore witness to the commonness of the practice.”

“If you were sailing into London for the first time, the approach to the city was lined with decomposing bodies in iron cages. That was your introduction to the capital.”

“Back on land, and going back slightly in time, 1676, Coombe in Berkshire. George Broomham and Dorothy Newman were adulterous lovers who murdered Broomham’s wife Martha and their son Robert.”

“The crime was witnessed by a local man known as Mad Thomas, the village idiot, and his testimony was apparently sufficient for conviction. Both Broomham and Newman were hanged at Winchester and gibbeted on a double gibbet at what became known as Coombe Gibbet, erected atop a Neolithic long barrow on Inkpen Beacon. That gibbet has been replaced repeatedly over the centuries.”

“The current one is the seventh replica, most recently put up in 1992, and it’s still there, 25 ft tall, visible from miles around, standing on a Bronze Age burial mound. There’s something about that layering of ancient death and early modern death and the tourists who drive out to photograph it that feels very English in a way I can’t quite articulate.”

“Now, the skull in the attic. John Breeds was a butcher and the landlord of the Flushing Inn in Rye, East Sussex, and he had a grudge against the town’s mayor, a man named James Lamb, who had convicted him for using false measures. On the evening of March 17th, 1743, Mayor Lamb was invited to a party for his son, but felt ill and sent his brother-in-law Alan Grebell in his place.”

“Grebell was wearing Lamb’s distinctive red cloak. It was dark. Breeds was waiting in St. Mary’s churchyard with a bone-handled knife. That and this is the detail had his name engraved on it. He stabbed Grebell multiple times, believing he was killing Lamb. Grebell managed to stagger home and died that night. Breeds was found hours later, drunk, apparently still shouting, ‘Butchers should kill lambs.'”

“The knife was recovered from the churchyard with his name on the handle. It was not a sophisticated crime. The trial was legally extraordinary. James Lamb, the intended victim, acted simultaneously as mayor, coroner, prosecuting party, judge, witness, and sheriff. One man wearing all of those hats in a single proceeding.”

“Breads was executed on the 8th of June, 1743, at a total documented cost of £11 and 11 pence, which included beer for the prisoner and the executioner. His body was placed in a gibbet cage on Gibbet Marsh near Rye, where it hung for somewhere between 16 and 30 years, depending on which source you trust. During that time, local women stole bones from the decomposing body to grind into powder as a cure for rheumatism.”

“The cage, with the skull still clamped in the head frame, ended up in the attic of Rye Town Hall. A replica is displayed at Rye Castle Museum. There was actually a proposal a few years back to put the original skull on public display, and there was a debate about it, because of course there was.”

“Eugene Aram is interesting because his case shows how a gibbeting could generate a cultural afterlife far larger than the crime itself.”

“Aram was born in 1704 in Ramsgill, Yorkshire. He was a schoolmaster and a self-taught philologist, quite a brilliant one apparently, working on the relationships between Celtic and European languages. In February, 1745, he murdered his friend Daniel Clark for valuable goods. Clark disappeared. Aram left Knaresborough, and for 13 years he taught school at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, living quietly and continuing his scholarly work.”

“Then, in 1758, a skeleton was discovered at Thistle Hill. Aram’s wife pointed the finger at him. A man named Richard Houseman turned King’s evidence. At his trial at York on August 3rd, 1759, Aram delivered what is widely regarded as one of the most eloquent defense speeches in English legal history. A long argument about the fallibility of circumstantial evidence. He lost.”

“He was convicted. In his cell, he confessed, claiming Clark had been having an affair with his wife. The night before his execution, he slashed the veins in his arm with a razor, trying to kill himself and nearly succeeded. They hanged him anyway at Nave’s Mire on August 16th, 1759, and gibbeted his body overlooking the River Nidd near the murder scene.”

“A doctor climbed the gibbet at some point and stole Aram’s skull for his collection. It eventually passed to the Royal College of Surgeons and is now in a museum at King’s Lynn. The Stories of Lynn Museum, if you want to visit. Thomas Hood wrote the ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram about the case. Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote a novel in 1832, and the murder became one of the great true crime stories of the 19th century, partly because of the gap between the brilliant scholarly man and the brutal act, partly because that defense speech was genuinely remarkable, and partly because 13 years of hiding in plain sight, teaching schoolchildren while the skeleton of your murder victim lay in a Hiller county away was the kind of story that the Victorian public couldn’t get enough of. Aram became a character in the cultural imagination long before the phrase true crime existed as a genre.”

“Spence Broughton robbed the Sheffield and Rotherham mail on Attercliffe Common in early 1791 stealing a French bill of exchange worth 123 pounds. He was arrested in London tried at York in a 90-minute trial and Justice Buller sentenced him to hang and afterwards to be hung in chains on the common within 3 miles of Sheffield.”

“They executed him at Neepsend Mire on April 14th, 1792 and 2 days later his body was hung on a gibbet at Attercliffe Common. 40,000 people visited on the first day. 40,000. For context, Sheffield’s population at the time was around 31,000. More people came to see Spence Broughton’s gibbet on the first day than actually lived in the city.”

“They came from miles around. The gibbet then remained there for 36 years. 36 years of Spence Broughton hanging outside Sheffield through summers and winters and the long slow transition from fresh corpse to skeleton to scraps. When Henry Sorby finally had it taken down in 1827 due to persistent trespassing on his land, there were still scraps of skull, bone, and clothing clinging to the apparatus.”

“The local newspaper noted that the gibbet had become such a familiar part of the landscape that people would give directions by reference to it. ‘Turn left at Broughton’s gibbet’ was a known way to navigate the road out of Sheffield. And then in 1867, when the gibbet post was unearthed during construction, described as ‘a piece about 4 and 1/2 ft long and 18 in square, black with age.’ Hundreds came out to see it again, as though the gibbet still had some kind of gravitational pull decades after the last bone had crumbled away.”

“There’s a lane named Broughton Lane in Sheffield. There’s a pub called The Noose and Gibbet Inn near the site with his metal shackles displayed at Western Park Museum. Joseph Mather composed a ballad called Spence Broughton’s Lament. And the highwayman became a creature of Sheffield folklore for generations. And drunken potters from the Don Pottery reportedly threw stones at the skeleton years after the gibbeting and knocked off two fingers, which they calcined and incorporated into the body of a jug.”

“They baked his finger bones into pottery. I don’t know what to do with that information except pass it along.”

“During the same period between 1792 and 1797, there was also a man named Frank Fern hanging in a gibbet on Loxley Common on the other side of Sheffield for murder. His bones reportedly fell from the gibbet on Christmas Day 1797, though the rattling cage remained longer.”

“Two simultaneous gibbets bracketing the same city, one to the east and one to the west. If you were walking the road between them on a quiet evening, with the wind coming off the moors, you’d hear the chains of one, and then, a few miles later, the chains of the other.”

“In August, 1791, William Winter murdered an elderly shopkeeper named Margaret Crozier at Raw Pailie, a remote farmhouse near Elsdon in Northumberland, aided by two sisters named Jane and Eleanor Clark.”

“The key witness was an 11-year-old boy named Richard Hindmarsh, who provided crucial identification evidence. Robert Baden-Powell later cited him in Scouting for Boys as an exemplar of careful observation. Winter’s family background was notable in a grim way. Both his father and his brother had previously been hanged at Morpeth.”

“After a 16-hour trial at Newcastle’s Moot Hall, all three were convicted. The women’s bodies were given to surgeons. Winter’s was gibbeted at Whiskershields Common, within sight of the murder scene, on the bleak Northumberland moorland. The stench from the decomposing body was reportedly so powerful that even horses refused to pass nearby.”

“The gibbet post was eventually replaced with a replica by Sir Walter Trevelyan in 1867, and it’s now a Grade II listed structure. The wooden mannequin that hangs from it has been rebuilt repeatedly. Vandals and weather keep destroying it, and now only a concrete head remains. People still visit.”

“It’s one of the most atmospheric historical sites in northern England, standing alone on the moor with the wind coming across the hills.”

“Louis Jeremiah Abershaw, Jerry Abershaw, terrorized the roads between London, Kingston, and Wimbledon from the age of 17, operating out of the Bald Faced Stag Inn. On January 13th, 1795, he shot a Bow Street runner named David Price dead at the Two Brewers Pub in Southwark.”

“At his trial, when the judge put on the black cap to deliver the death sentence, Abershaw put on his own hat in mockery. He arrived at Kennington Common for execution on August 3rd, 1795, with a flower in his mouth, his shirt open to the waist, and kicked off his boots to disprove his mother’s prediction that he’d die with them on.”

“His tarred body was gibbeted at Putney Vale, and up to 100,000 people are reported to have visited. Members of his gang climbed the gibbet and stole finger and toe bones to use as pipe stoppers. He was the last highwayman to be gibbeted.”

“Thomas Temporel, known as Tom Otter, born 1782 in Treswell, Nottinghamshire. This one is a particularly dark story. Otter was already married to a woman named Martha Rawlinson when he took up with Mary Kirkham while working as a canal navvy in Lincolnshire. When Mary became pregnant, the local magistrates forced what was called a knobstick marriage. Marry the girl or go to prison.”

“On the 3rd of November, 1805, the morning of his wedding at Hykeham Church, to which he’d been escorted by two constables because nobody trusted him to show up voluntarily. Otter battered his new bride to death with a hedge stake near Drinsey Nook in Saxilby. She was 24 years old and 8 months pregnant. He was convicted at Lincoln Assizes and executed on March 14th, 1806.”

“They measured him for his gibbet irons before killing him. This was standard practice. The blacksmith needed dimensions, but think about what that means for the condemned man, standing there while someone takes measurements of your body for the cage they’re going to put you in after you’re dead. Ralph Smith of Lincolnshire had gone through the same fitting process in 1792 and reportedly found it impossible to retain the composure he had exhibited during sentencing.”

“I’d imagine not. Otter’s tarred body was caged and hung from a 30-ft pole about 100 yards from where Mary’s body had been found. The scene attracted what one account described as a week of merrymaking of the most unseemly character, with food and drink booths set up underneath, as if they were at a wake or a fair.”

“This is one of those recurring patterns. The authorities would set up a gibbet hoping for solemn contemplation of justice, and the public would turn it into a day out. Every single time. The gibbet remained for 44 years. 44. It finally came down in a storm in 1850, at which point gypsies quickly carried off most of the iron work.”

“The headpiece survives at Doddington Hall. A section of leg iron was later fashioned into nutcrackers, which really feels like it should be the strangest sentence in this script, but honestly, it has competition. Tom Otter’s Lane, Gibbet Wood, and Gibbet Lane Cottages all survive near Saxilby. There’s a story, probably apocryphal, but widely told, that the gibbet post was later used as a support beam in a local cottage, and tenants reported hearing groaning sounds from the wood on stormy nights.”

“Lincolnshire folklore is full of Tom Otter. He became a ghost story, a place name, a set of nutcrackers, and a warning to men who didn’t want to honor their obligations, all at once.”

“I want to take a detour to France, because the scale of what they built there makes England look restrained by comparison, and I don’t use the word restrained about English gibbeting lightly.”

“The gibbet of Montfaucon was a permanent masonry structure, built in the late 13th century under Louis the IX, then converted to stone under Charles the IV around 1325. It consisted of roughly 16 stone pillars, each about 30 ft tall, supporting crossbeams with iron chains and hooks capable of displaying up to 50 bodies simultaneously. 50 at the same time.”

“This wasn’t a single gibbet post by a crossroads. This was an industrial installation for the display of the dead, a permanent purpose-built facility on a hill northeast of Paris, visible for miles. An English travel writer named Thomas Coryat saw it around 1608 and called it the fairest gallows that I ever saw, Which is a phrase that reveals a lot about Thomas Coryat and possibly about the English relationship to execution infrastructure in general.”

“The notable people displayed there include Pierre de La Brosse in 1278, Enguerrand de Marigny in 1315, and most dramatically, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was murdered during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 and hung by his feet from Montfaucon. An alarming number of the people who ended up there were royal treasurers, which suggests something about the occupational hazards of managing French state finances.”

“The structure was used until 1627 and demolished in 1760. Victor Hugo featured it in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When construction workers dug at the site in 1954, they found pillar bases and human remains.”

“Scotland had its own gibbeting tradition. 22 men hung in chains there between 1746 and 1810, with the earliest recorded case being Thomas Armstrong in 1601, tried for the murder of Sir John Carmichael.”

“But the most infamous Scottish case was a miscarriage of justice that later inspired Robert Louis Stevenson. In May 1752, Colin Roy Campbell, a government factor overseeing the forfeiture of Jacobite estates after the ’45 Rebellion, was shot dead on the road through Appin in Argyll. James Stewart, known as James of the Glens, was arrested as an accessory.”

“His trial was presided over by the Duke of Argyll, who was the chief of Clan Campbell, the murdered man’s own clan chief, sitting in judgement, and 11 of the 15 jurors were Campbells. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The whole thing was a piece of political theater dressed up as law. Stewart was hanged on the 8th of November, 1752, on a specially built 30-ft gibbet above the narrows at Ballachulish, and his body remained there for 18 months, battered by Highland winds, as a warning to the Jacobite population.”

“His friends and family repeatedly attempted to recover the body, but were prevented by a military guard. Stevenson used the case as the backbone of Kidnapped, and the identity of the actual murderer has been debated in the Highlands for nearly three centuries. The last gibbeting in Scotland was Alexander Gillan in 1810, hanged for rape and murder, and gibbeted on Spynie Muir near Elgin.”

“The physical construction of gibbet cages is a subject that Sarah Tarlow at the University of Leicester has researched extensively, and the findings are revealing. These cages were made by local blacksmiths, who typically had no prior experience with the task. There was no pattern book, no standard design. Each smith independently solved the engineering problem of containing a human body in iron under enormous time pressure, and the result was that every cage is unique.”

“Named craftsmen include John Fox, who was paid £5, 15 shillings, and 6d for the irons in one case, and Joseph Hull of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, who made a cage for a colonial gibbeting in 1751. The construction used wrought iron flat bars typically 2 and 1/2 inches wide. A standard cage included an iron collar, a headpiece with vertical straps to hold the skull, some with shaped nose pieces, vertical bars down the torso, crossbars at various points, stirrups for the feet, and a swivel eye at the top for suspension.”

“Where possible, the condemned man was measured for his irons before execution. The cost was significant, often equivalent to a year’s laborer’s wages. One gibbeting in 1787 cost over 60 pounds in total, an enormous sum. The expenses were borne by the local sheriff and claimed back from the crown through documents called sheriff’s cravings, which are preserved in the national archives and provide extraordinarily detailed financial records of the process.”

“Tarring is mentioned in almost every contemporary account, but strangely never appears as a line item in the sheriff’s cravings, even though trivial expenses like ale for guards were carefully recorded. The tarring served two purposes, preserving the body longer and making the whole thing more flammable, which turned out to be relevant because sympathizers occasionally set gibbets on fire.”

“In at least one case, the tar aided the cremation so effectively that by morning only the chain links remained. Gibbet posts were made from timber, typically 30 feet or more tall, sometimes reinforced with iron bars at the base. Some posts were studded with thousands of nails. One was reportedly studded with 12,000 to prevent anyone from sawing through them. William Jobling’s post was described as 1 ft in diameter with strong”