Tag Archives: emanuel dickenson

1726: Edward Burnworth and his gang, London Lives

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Edward Burnworth and his gang — a group of villains who “seem to have risen to notoriety on the downfall of [Jonathan] Wild” by the estimation of the Newgate Calendar — were executed on this date in 1726, and thereafter hung in chains.

We endorse a bio of this coterie of thieves turned murderers on LondonLives.org. This wonderful site “makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners”; it’s in the same spirit as the oft-cited-by-Executed Today site Old Bailey Online site, and involves some of the very same principal authors.*

Their zoom-in on Burnworth et al finds the gang slaying one Thomas Hall, a gin shop owner who was attempting to set up as a thief-taker in the vacuum created by the hanging of the aforementioned Jonathan Wild — previously London’s preeminent thief-taker and (simultaneously) crime lord. Burnworth, William Blewitt, Thomas Berry, John Legee, John Higgs, and Emanuel Dickenson all suffered together and were gibbeted in chains thereafter, two apiece at St. George’s Fields, Putney Common and Kennington Common, although the last of these was given over to his friends for burial after just one day of exposure in consideration of his father’s honorable military service.

(Burnworth unsuccessfully attempted to exonerate of theft a man bound for the gallows a month before him, by confessing to the crime.)

* Tim Hitchcock, a historian now at the University of Sussex and a director instrumental to both sites, has previously provided some commentary directly to Executed Today as well, weighing in for example on the controversial identity of “Smugglerius” as well as OldBaileyOnline.org digitization practices. There are several other related “history from below” sites in his orbit: Locating London’s Past, Connected Histories, and The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925.

On this day..