UWE History Seminar: 'For The Benefit Of Example': Hanging West Country Felons C. 1730-1830,

Speaker: Dr Steve Poole is Associate Professor of History at UWE, Bristol

Men and women sentenced to death by the West Country’s assize courts were usually executed either at the county gaol or on traditional hanging grounds sited on the peripheries of the region’s county towns. By the 1790s, most of these executions were carried out on purpose built scaffolds with trapdoor systems – a practice considered quicker, cleaner and more economically efficient than the older method of rough strangulation from the back of a cart.

If we are to read this development as an expression of the civilising influence of modernity, or a humane relaxation of the Hanoverian ‘bloody code’, how are we to understand the continuance of the much older practice of processing certain convicts across miles of open country to relatively obscure rural parishes so that they could be despatched at the scene of their crime? Despite the enormous costs, the logistical difficulties, the security issues and the archaic nature of the execution apparatus, crime-scene hangings were still taking place in the region as late as 1830. This talk seeks answers in local geography and in the customary principle of exemplary justice.