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Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827): A Gibbet
(detail)
Undated watercolor and ink on paper (36 x 27.5 cm)
I've discussed the topic of capital punishment in a previous post and mentioned that I live close to a notorious junction known as Gallows Corner, where they used to hang men in the old days [a].
I believe it was also the preferred practice to leave the bodies of those executed hanging in chains or fastened into an iron
frame. And so that the public display might be prolonged, bodies were sometimes coated in tar and left until almost completely decomposed, after which the
bones would be scattered.
Known as gibbeting, this common law punishment was designed as a piece of violent theatre and a final humiliation intended to provide an additional deterrence measure, just in case the threat of hanging wasn't enough to prevent the heinous crime of murder.
An ancient practice, gibbeting wasn't enshrined within English law until the Murder Act of 1751; an act which also included the provision that execution would take place two days after sentencing, unless the third day was a Sunday, in which case the condemned - and those who looked forward to seeing him swing - would have to wait until Monday morning [b].
The act also gave the judge passing sentence the power to turn the body of the condemned over to the medical profession for dissection and anatomical study, rather than hung in chains, which, I suppose, one might find a less shameful fate (although I suspect that, if given a choice, a hardened highwayman or pirate would reply like James Bond who when asked by a barman following a heavy loss at the poker table whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred says: Do I look like I give a damn? [c]
II.
As a sensitive child, I was upset for days if I saw even a dead hedgehog by the roadside.
So I'm fairly certain that the sight of a rotting human corpse on a gibbet might have been similarly distressing. Although, having said that, the reactions of children to scenes of horror can be complex - as Daphen du Maurier illustrates at the opening of her Gothic novel My Cousin Rachel (1951) ...
Reflecting on the time when, as a seven-year-old, he is taken by his much older cousin (and guardian), Ambrose, to view some poor wretch left hanging in chains where the four roads meet, Philip Ashley recalls:
"His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.
He swung between earth and sky upon his gibbet, or, as my cousin Ambrose told me, betwixt heaven and hell. [...] Ambrose prodded at the body with his stick. I can see it now, moving with the wind like a weather-vane on a rusty pivot, a poor scarecrow of what had been a man. The rain had rotted his breeches, if not his body, and strips of worsted drooped from his swollen limbs like pulpy paper." [d]
Philip continues:
"It was winter, and some passing joker had placed a sprig of holly in the torn vest for celebration. Somehow, at seven years old, that seemed to me the final outrage, but I said nothing." [1] [e]
Having walked round the gibbet so as to observe the horror from all sides, with Ambrose playfully poking and prodding the corpse with his stick, as if it were a funfair attraction provided for his amusement, Philip's cousin eventually attempts to put things into a philosophical context and provide a moral lesson:
"'There you are, Philip,' he said, 'it's what we all come to in the end. Some upon a battlefield, some in bed, others according to their destiny. There's no escape. You can't learn the lesson too young. But this is how a felon dies. A warning to you and me to lead the sober life.'" [2]
Stopping short of condoning femicide, but cheerfully parading his sexism, Ambrose continues:
"'See what a moment of passion can bring upon a fellow [...] Here is Tom Jenkyn, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It's true his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.'" [2]
Philip is disturbed to discover the dead man's identity and to realise that, in fact, he knew him. He wished Ambrose had not named him:
"Up to that moment the body had been a dead thing, without identity. It would come into my dreams, lifeless and horrible, I knew that very well from the first instant I had set my eyes upon the gibbet. Now it would have connection with reality, and with the man with watery eyes who sold lobsters on the town quay." [2]
When asked by Ambrose what he thinks, Philip attempts to disguise the fact that he felt "sick at heart, and terrified" [2]. And so he answers in an amusing and remarkably precocious manner for a child: "'Tom had a brighter face when I last saw him. [...] Now he isn't fresh enough to become bait for his own lobsters.'" [2] [f]
However, despite such witty bravado, Philip's actual squeamishness causes him to vomit before leaving the scene at Four Turnings: "I felt better afterwards, though my teeth chattered and I was very cold." [3]
Perhaps in anger, Philip throws a stone at the lifeless body of Tom Jenkyn; though, as he ran off in search of Ambrose who had walked ahead, he felt ashamed of his action. So much so, that, eighteen years later, he is planning to seek out poor Tom in the afterlife in order to apologise.
Until then, however, he asks the ghost of Tom Jenkyn to disturb him no more: "Go back into your shadows, Tom, and leave me some measure of peace. That gibbet has long since gone [g] and you with it. I threw a stone at you in ignorance. Forgive me." [3]
I don't know about Tom, the lobster salesman and wife killer, but I suspect most readers will almost certainly forgive such a childish indiscretion.
Though whether they will be equally forgiving of Philip's treatment of Rachel - and there is no proof that she was guilty of anything, as Philip finds no concrete evidence to show she had a hand in the death of Ambrose, or that she was slowly poisoning him - is debatable ... [h]
Notes
[a] See the post dated 20 March 2019: click here.
[b] The act of 1751 also stipulated that under no circumstances should the body of a murderer be afforded a decent burial. The act was formally repealed in 1834, by which date the use of gibbeting was very much out of favour with both the public and the authorities; the last two men to be gibbeted in England had been executed two years prior. The socio-cultural reason for this move away from such violent and spectacular forms of punishment in favour of more subtle - more humanitarian - techniques is famously examined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975).
[c] I'm referring to a scene in Casino Royale (dir. Martin Campbell, 2006), starring Daniel Craig in his debut as James Bond. The joke, of course, is that usually Bond is very particular about how he likes his martini served (shaken, not stirred).
[d] Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (Virago Press, 2017), p. 1. Future page references to this edition will be given directly in the post.
Interestingly, with adult hindsight, Philip has decided that Ambrose must have taken him to witness this horrific scene as a test of his character; "to see if I would run away, or laugh, or cry" (p. 1).
[e] It's arguable that the sprig of holly was not placed in mockery by some passing joker, but, rather, in a spirit of Christian charity and forgiveness; for holly is a sign of the eternal life that is promised to those who repent their sins and accept the love of Christ.
[f] As a matter of fact, although lobsters are scavengers that feed on dead animals, live fish, small molluscs and other marine invertebrates, they are not known for eating human flesh.
[g] Du Maurier doesn't reveal the year in which her novel unfolds, but if, as Philip informs us, the gibbet has long since gone and those accused of murder are now given a fair trial and, if subsequently convicted and sentenced to death, a decent burial, then it would certainly be set after 1834 (see note b above).
Roger Michell, the director and screenwriter of the 2017 cinematic adaptation of My Cousin Rachel starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin, situates his film "somewhere in the 1840s (between Austen and Dickens: between canals and railways)", as he writes in an introduction to the 2017 Virago edition of du Maurier's book (p. vii).
[h] Du Maurier is a mistress of ambiguity who loves supplying her books with narrators whose defining characteristic is their unreliability. And so we can never know for certain who's guilty of what and who's the real victim. At one time, I would've found that irritating: Not any more, though.
