Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900

ISBN-13: 9781009392150 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 330 str.

Simon Devereaux

Opis

This book provides the first comprehensive account of execution practices in England and their extraordinary transformation from 1660 to 1900. Agonizing execution rituals were once common. Male traitors were hanged, disembowelled while still alive, then decapitated and quartered. Female traitors were burned alive. And common criminals slowly choked to death beneath wooden crossbeams erected at the margins of towns. Some of their bodies were either left to rot on roadside gibbets or dissected by anatomy instructors. Two centuries later, only murderers and traitors were executed – both by hanging – and they died alone, usually quickly, and behind prison walls. In this major contribution to the history of crime and punishment in England, Simon Devereaux reveals how urban growth, and the unique public culture it produced, challenged and largely displaced those traditional elites who valued the old 'Bloody Code' as an instrument of their rule.

Recenzje

'Simon Devereaux brings together several decades of work, including his own, in English criminal justice history to give a complete picture of a great but painfully slow transition from a Tudor-Stuart England that publicly executed people for what would now be considered trivial property infractions, to Queen Victoria's reign that executed people out of public view for the single crime of murder, to the ultimate abolition of capital punishment in the mid-twentieth century. He sensitively enters a mental world very different from that of today, while at the same time clarifying how political, social, and cultural changes made this great transformation possible.' Martin Wiener, Rice University

Spis treści

1. Introduction; 2. Executions for Treason, 1660-1820; 3. Changing Cultures of Execution: Religion and Feeling, 1660-1770; 4. Changing Cultures of Execution: Reason and Reforms, 1770-1808; 5. The Murder Act: Anatomization, 1752-1832; 6. The Murder Act: Hanging in Chains, 1660-1834; 7. The 'Bloody Code' Debated, 1808-1821; 8. The 'Bloody Code' Diminished, 1822-1830; 9. The Vicissitudes of Public Execution, 1830-1900; 10. Conclusion.