The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868

ISBN-13: 9780192853325 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 656 str.

V A C Gatrell

Opis

Hanging people for petty crimes as well as grave, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. Some 7,000 men and women were executed on public scaffolds, watched by crowds of thousands.
This acclaimed study is the first to explore what a wide range of people felt about these ceremonies. Gatrell draws on letters, diaries, ballads, broadsides, and images, as well as on poignant appeals for mercy which, until now, have been largely neglected by historians. Panoramic in range, scholarly in method, and compelling in style and in argument, this is one of those rare histories which both shift our sense of the past and speak powerfully to the present.

Recenzje

A quite outstanding book, moving, perceptive ... richly imaginative.

O autorze

V. A. C. Gatrell is University Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He is editor of Robert Owen: A New View of Society (Pelican, 1971) and Crime and Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (Europa, 1980), and a well-known author of numerous articles in social and economic history. He lives in Cambridge.