How is it possible that I only recently read A Handbook on Hanging by smart-ass British historian Charles Duff? Acerbic beyond belief, Duff’s book, originally published in 1928 and updated decades later, is a droll yet furious account of the way we officially murder one another. From the introduction:

“As a form of capital punishment, hanging was introduced to Britain by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes as early as the fifth century. The gallows were an important element in Germanic culture. The worthy Hengist and Horsa and their colleagues used a very rough and out-of-hand method of hanging, one that resembled our clean and tidy modern method in only this respect: it worked quite well.

William the Conqueror subsequently decreed that it should be replaced by castration and blinding for all but the crime of poaching royal deer, but hanging was reintroduced by Henry I as the means of execution for a large number of offenses. Although other methods of execution, such as boiling, burning and beheading were frequently used in the mediaeval period, by the eighteenth century hanging had become the principle punishment for capital crimes.

The eighteenth century also saw the start of the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1770 [the British Politician] William Meredith, suggested ‘more proportionate punishments’ for crimes. He was followed in the early nineteenth century by [the legal reformer and Solicitor General] Samuel Romilly and [the Scottish jurist, politician and historian] James Mackintosh, both of whom introduced bills into Parliament in an attempt to de-capitalise minor crimes.

Perhaps unsurprising, considering the fact that in Britain at the time there were no less than 222 crimes which were defined as capital offenses, including the impersonation of a Chelsea pensioner and damaging Westminster Bridge. Moreover, the law did not distinguish between adults and children, and ‘strong evidence of malice in a child of 7 to 14 years of age’ was also a hanging matter.”

••••••••••

“They were hanging in the trees, dead and dying / And I said, ‘What does it mean?'”:

“Into our town the hangman came / Smelling of blood and gold and flame”: