1783: John Austin
November 3rd, 2007 Headsman
On this date in 1783, highwayman John Austin was hanged at Tyburn for robbing and murdering John Spicer on the road to London.
The village Tyburn on the outskirts of London had been used for public hangings dating to the 12th century. Though not the only site of executions in London, it was the iconic one. Situated at the modern intersection of Edgware and Bayswater Roads on the northeast corner of Hyde Park, the distinctive “Tyburn tree” — a triangular gallows capable of hanging over twenty prisoners simultaneously — made a foreboding landmark round which teemed thousands of spectators on execution days. Some 1,200 people were executed on this singular device.
Public executions typically began four kilometers away at Newgate Prison, where the condemned were loaded into ox carts for a two-to-three-hour procession through public streets now at the very core of London, perhaps including stops at public ale houses.
While Tyburn carved its niche during England’s age of religious bloodletting, its social role had changed significantly by the 18th century. Most of the doomed were offenders against property, often executed for stealing negligible sums or else reprieved for transport to Australia. Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged intriguingly suggests that hangings of this era were an assertion of nascent capitalism, violently throwing off the remains of feudal labor relations. (Summarized more thoroughly in this friendly review.)
Even that formative age was receding. Once a neighboring village, Tyburn had been swallowed up by the city; a generation before Austin’s death, residents of the now-upscale neighborhood had successfully pushed for the removal of the macabre “Tyburn tree”.
Austin was hanged, instead, on a portable gallows, a typical penitent imploring heavenly mercy and taking 10 minutes to strangle to death — the very last execution at that somber and storied crossroads.
Here’s the story of the Tyburn hangings from London writer Peter Ackroyd:
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Entry Filed under: 18th Century, Common Criminals, England, Hanged, Milestones, Murder, Popular Culture, Public Executions, Theft, Tyburn
Tags: 1780s, 1783, economics, hyde park, john austin, newgate prison, november 3, peter ackroyd, peter linebaugh, Tyburn, tyburn tree
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9 Comments Add your own
1. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 12th, 2008 at 2:33 am
[...] November 12th, 2007 Headsman On this date in 1755, a young soldier named Rowley Hanson was hanged at Tyburn. [...]
2. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 24th, 2008 at 8:21 am
[...] November 24th, 2007 Headsman On this date in 1740, five criminals were hanged at Tyburn. [...]
3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | December 9th, 2008 at 1:15 am
[...] Tyburn era drew to a close late in the 18th century. Five weeks before, its last victim swung there. The former hanging grounds of Tyburn, sketched by William Capon in 1785. The gallery [...]
4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | February 15th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
[...] the public hanging — were the very image of the death penalty; its most characteristic venue at the corner of Hyde Park is still marked with a [...]
5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | March 18th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
[...] but flesh must have bread. Like countless others through time — indeed, like countless other clients of Tyburn — Jenny found metropolis less than convivial to aspirations of honest [...]
6. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | March 22nd, 2009 at 1:17 am
[...] Chaloner, a convicted coiner, refused the Newgate Jail Chaplain’s plea to show proper penitence, shouting with “more Passion than Piety,” of his wronged state and unmerited destination (according to his anonymous biographer in the one surviving account of his life). In time, he calmed sufficiently to accept the sacrament, and so proceeded to the execution convoy to be borne from Newgate to the hanging tree at Tyburn (now Marble Arch, just to the west of the old City of London). [...]
7. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | March 25th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
[...] behavior on the way to the gallows would have done many a condemned wretch proud: On the road to Tyburn she showed little concern at her miserable state, and paid no attention to the exhortations of the [...]
8. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | June 13th, 2009 at 1:22 am
[...] 13th, 2009 Headsman This 1726 poem by Jonathan Swift toasts a charismatic client of the Tyburn tree — who is, alas, completely [...]
9. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | August 13th, 2009 at 1:27 am
[...] a century in the making; in 1783, Albion had eliminated London’s traditional, disorderly procession to Tyburn in favor of public hangings just outside the walls of the prison — to the chagrin of [...]
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