Every entry on this blog is, of course, an ending of a sort.

But some endings are more final than others.

For centuries in the British Empire and its descendant countries, the hanging — and especially 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 stone.

For many reasons, that model changed in the 19th and 20th centuries: gradually and unevenly, hangings moved behind prison walls or were replaced with (purportedly) more humane methods, even as capital punishment itself came under pressure.

For the remainder of the week, Executed Today remembers a few milestones in the changing landscape of hanging under English-inspired jurisprudence in the mid-20th century.

• The last hangings in England
• The last public hanging in America
• The last hanging in Scotland

On this day..

• 1831: Dic Penderyn, Merthyr Rising martyr
• 1937: Leslie George Stone, hanged by a fiber
• 1997: Ali Reza Khoshruy Kuran Kordiyeh, the Tehran Vampire
• Feast Day of Pope Pontian and Antipope Hippolytus
• 1891: Bir Tikendrajit, Patriots' Day martyr
• 1575: Charles du Puy-Montbrun, unequal
• 1864: Barney Gibbons, chance recognition
• 1997: Chiang Kuo-ching, Taiwan wrongful conviction
• 1926: Richard Whittemore, Mencken subject
• 1915: George Joseph Smith, Brides in the Bath murderer
• 1776: Neptune, as witnessed by John Gabriel Stedman
• 1868: Thomas Wells, the first private hanging in England
• 1964: Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen, England's last hangings