On this date in 1751, Irish boxer James Field was hanged at Tyburn.

He had ditched his criminal record in Dublin for the burgeoning London metropolis and hung out a shingle at a pub on Drury Lane. (Perhaps he knew the Muffin Man.)

“dustmen, scavengers, flue-fakers, gardeners, fish-fags, and brick-layer’s labourers … the Hibernian was relating the ill usage he had been subjected to, and the necessity he had of making a hasty retreat from the quarters he had taken up” (Description of Drury Lane … from 1821. Close enough.)

Field soon developed a blackhearted reputation in London, and because he was a big bad boxer on the brute squad, constables were known to “fail to recognize” him the better to get home safe to dinner.

Even in a city without a professional police force, though, that’s a thin reed to rest one’s liberty upon. Eventually the mighty British Empire marshaled the marshals necessary to run Field to ground for a violent heist. This time, his hulking build clinched his sure identification, and he earned the hemp for his felonies.

Field lives on in William Hogarth‘s anti-animal cruelty engravings Four Stages of Cruelty, published later in 1751. He’s the model for the hanged corpse being carved apart in the dissection theater in the last plate.

Second Plate:

In Hogarth’s Second Stage of Cruelty, a small poster in the background advertises a James Field bout against George Taylor.

Fourth Plate:

In Hogarth’s Reward of Cruelty, the hanged corpse laid out for dissection (and dog food) is modeled on James Field.

On this day..

• 1918: The Cattaro Mutineers
• 1876: Owen Lindsay, of the Baldwinsville Homicide
• 1751: William Parsons, Grub Street fodder
• Daily Double: Child Burglars in Nuremberg
• 1584: Silly Mary and Country Kate
• 1957: Fernand Iveton, pied-noir revolutionary
• 1691: Sylvester Medvedev, bread-worshipper
• 1896: Bartholomew "Bat" Shea, political machine ballot-stuffer
• 1992: Johnny Frank Garrett, "kiss my ass because I'm innocent"
• 1984: Maqbool Bhat, for Kashmir
• 1585: Frederick Werner, the executioner's brother-in-law
• 1944: Twenty-two or more Poles
• 1869: Patrick Whelan, Canada's first assassin?