Punishing The Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840: Aggravated Forms Of The Death Penalty In England (palgrave Historical Studies In The Criminal Corpse And Its Afterlife)
by Peter King /
2017 / English / PDF
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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence.This book analyses the different types of post-execution
punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons
why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder
Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and
gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the
origins of the Act, and then explores the ways in which Act was
actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of
penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at the abandonment
of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the rapid decline of hanging
in chains just after 1800, and the final abandonment of both
dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It concludes that the
Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an
important role within the broader capital punishment system well
into the nineteenth century. While eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the ‘Bloody
Code’ and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’,
they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital
punishment system – the courts extensive use of aggravated and
post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to
rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.
This book analyses the different types of post-execution
punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons
why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder
Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and
gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the
origins of the Act, and then explores the ways in which Act was
actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of
penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at the abandonment
of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the rapid decline of hanging
in chains just after 1800, and the final abandonment of both
dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It concludes that the
Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an
important role within the broader capital punishment system well
into the nineteenth century. While eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the ‘Bloody
Code’ and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’,
they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital
punishment system – the courts extensive use of aggravated and
post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to
rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.