Tales of London

London unarguably has a bloody past, and there are plenty of worthy contenders for its most gruesome location - but there is perhaps no location in the capital quite so synonymous with death as Tyburn. Now the site of the splendour of neoclassical Marble Arch (and formerly of the less-than-splendid Marble Arch Mound), for centuries this frenetic traffic junction was witness to thousands of executions.

The Manor of Tyburn is first mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086, with a population of just a few dozen. It was named after the Tyburn Brook, a tributary of the Westbourne River – and not to be confused with the much larger Tyburn River about half a mile to the east (although both probably derive from the words ‘Teo Bourne’, meaning ‘boundary stream’). Despite its small population, Tyburn lay at the crossroads of two important Roman roads: modern day Edgware Road and Oxford Street. Being a short distance outside of the City with excellent transport connections bestowed upon Tyburn the ignominious honour of hosting London’s predominant execution spot.

The first recorded execution at Tyburn was in 1196 with the hanging of William Fitz Osbert, a proto-Watt Tyler. Executions gradually became more common at Tyburn over the centuries, including pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck in 1499, and ‘Holy Maid of Kent’ Elizabeth Barton in 1534. Smithfield was still the popular site for the burning of religious heretics, notoriously so under the five-year reign of Queen ‘Bloody’ Mary in the 1550s: around forty protestants were conflagrated at Smithfield during her rule. When Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558 she changed tack, as Elizabeth could see the damage Mary had made to her reputation by creating religious martyrs out of those she executed. Instead of burning Catholics for heresy, Elizabeth elected to have them tried and hanged for high treason: to be a religious dissenter was an issue of conscience, but to actively plot against your Queen and country was the worst crime imaginable. From hereon in Tyburn became the principal location for executions, typically hangings, possibly with a drawing and a quartering thrown into the mix.

The first permanent gallows at Tyburn was erected in 1571 under Elizabeth’s reign, for the execution of “Romish Canonical Doctor” (read: Catholic priest) John Story. This event marked the birth of the infamous Tyburn Tree: a triple legged gibbet, resembling a triangular stool without a seat, on which multiple criminals could be hanged simultaneously: twenty-four were executed in such a manner in 1649. The authorities no doubt imagined these public executions would prove to be solemn affairs, causing the populace to think upon their own sins to avoid an equally ignominious fate. But predictably the public hangings had the completely opposite effect, and became a day of revelry and merry making for London’s great unwashed.

At Newgate Prison, now the site of the Old Bailey, the condemned would be seated on the back of an oxcart. The route to Tyburn was around three miles, along an almost direct road down modern day Holborn and Oxford Street. Executions were public holidays, and tens of thousands would line the route to either jeer or salute the criminal, depending on both the level of sympathy towards them, and the bravado displayed in the face of their demise: at the execution of celebrated ‘gentleman thief’ Jack Sheppard in 1724, 200,000 spectators lined the streets and at the site of the gallows to cheer him on. One Scottish clergyman reported around that time at another execution:

Among the immense multitude of spectators accommodated according to their rank and payment - some at windows, some upon carts, thousands standing and jostling one another on the surrounding fields — my conviction is that, in a moral view, a great number were made worse instead of better, by the awful spectacle. Of the ragamuffin class a large proportion were gratified by the sight; and within my hearing many expressed their admiration of the fortitude, as they termed the hardness and stupidity, of one of the sufferers. “Well done, little coiner!” “What a brave fellow he is!” with many other expressions of gross perverted applause, were repeated, both on the spot and on the return through Oxford Road.

Urban legend, propagated by many a London pub, is that the oxcart would stop at a public house en-route to Tyburn to allow the condemned one last alcoholic beverage. This appears to be modern tourist enticing myth making though rather than being based upon any historic evidence; indeed, I’ve even seen pubs make this claim on their history despite being nowhere near the Newgate to Tyburn route. Similarly, the common belief that the phrases ‘one for the road’ and ‘on the wagon’ originated from this practice is etymological codswallop. 

Upon reaching Tyburn the convicted would be forgiven for thinking they’d accidentally arrived at a carnival: tens of thousands of spectators were enthralled by street vendors, food sellers and entertainments. An army of pickpockets made a mockery of the supposed moral rectitude of the day’s main event. Wooden stands were constructed offering a clear view of the gallows for a fee, although on at least one occasion the stand collapsed resulting in the death of several spectators. The noose would be placed around the condemned’s neck whilst they were still standing on the oxcart, and then the horse and cart led away, leaving them strung up in mid-air. It could take up to forty-five minutes for strangulation to result in death; the friends and family of the near-deceased would often pull down on their legs to speed up the process and relieve the suffering. A curious superstition was that the hand of the executed had medicinal qualities, and many in the crowd would attempt to touch it to cure illnesses: one young woman is reported to have bared her bosom and placed the departed’s hand upon it. The clothing of the dead belonged to the hangman, colloquially know as the ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’. In earlier years the corpses were then thrown in a pit near to the gallows, but later they would be passed over to the barber surgeons for dissection.

A rather bizarre case of post-mortem execution took place at Tyburn in the seventeenth century. Following the English Civil War of the 1640s and the later restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the bodies of leading Commonwealth figures Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, and Henry Ireton were disinterred from their respective graves. Their corpses were then strung up at Tyburn on the 30th January 1661 – the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I outside Whitehall Palace – where they were left hanging from sunrise to sunset. They were then beheaded, and the decapitated bodies thrown into the Tyburn pit, where they supposedly remain to this day.

The last execution at Tyburn took place on the 3rd November 1783, with the hanging of highwayman John Austin. Oxford Street, and the area of Mayfair to its south, was increasingly upmarket, and the well-to-do did not care for the riff-raff of London crowding the neighbourhood to cheer on the supposed scum of society. Public hangings now took place directly outside Newgate Prison on Old Bailey until 1868, when they were relocated inside the prison walls. Today the only traces of the sinister Tyburn Tree are a stone slab on the triangular traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road, and a plaque to the Catholic Martyrs on the wall of the Tyburn Convent about a quarter of a mile to the west.

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