Book Review: Executions: 700 Years of Public Punishment in London

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Executions: 700 Years of Public Punishment in London. Edited by Jackie Keily. London: Philip Wilson, 2022. 144 p. Includes illustrations and index. ISBN 9781781301081 (softcover) $26.99.

Reviewed by Amy Kaufman
Head Law Librarian
Queen’s University

The death penalty may seem distant for many of us, with its last use in Canada in 1962 and abolition in 1976 (although full abolition only came in 1998 when it was also removed for the military). However, it was a real part of our country’s justice system for more than a hundred years, with 710 people executed by the state between 1859 and 1962. As a British colony, Canada inherited that punishment as part of its legal system, and the book Executions: 700 Years of Public Punishment in London gives us insight into its history.

This richly illustrated book accompanies a recent exhibition at the Museum of London. Written by museum curators, it examines the history of public executions in Britain’s most populous city through documents and objects. It goes beyond the macabre, though this is a necessary part of the examination, given its grim subject. It considers the people involved: the condemned, the executioners, the judges, and the public themselves, for, as the authors note, these were highly choreographed spectacles meant to convey important messages to the crowds about what happens to rule-breakers and to demonstrate “the power of the Crown, Church and state over the life and death of its citizens” (p. 7).

This book describes that state machinery, starting with the crimes that could lead to death. There were over two hundred capital offences by the 18th century, all listed in an appendix to the Black Act 1723—also known as the “Bloody Code”—and included things like importing counterfeit coins, robbing rabbit warrens, and destroying a fence.

The chapter on trials at the Old Bailey might hold particular interest for law libraries. We learn about how an 18th-century criminal trial unfolded—often with the person alleging the crime acting as prosecutor and the defendant representing themselves. Particularly striking is the system’s speed: the trial often only lasted a few hours, and, along with sentencing and the execution itself, the proceedings could be complete within a matter of days. It likely helped that juries “could be kept without food, water or heat” if they were taking too long to render a verdict (p. 50).

The authors go beyond the recorded laws to remind us of the reality of the system: there were so many people convicted under the Bloody Code that “the justice system depended on reprieves to reduce the number of executions to a manageable level” (p. 49). Who received those reprieves? Who were more likely to be convicted and executed? These are the sorts of questions this book delves into, giving us a picture of how the justice system—and its society—really operated.

Pictures of coins smoothed and then engraved by condemned prisoners for their loved ones bring a poignant, human touch. Contemporaneous illustrations of the crowds at the executions, along with the broadsides purporting to be the text of the prisoners’ dying speeches—which were hawked by vendors at the executions and then sold up and down the country in the following days—are just some of the surviving documentary evidence of the spectacle and robust economy of these “hanging days” (p. 7).

This is grim history. But, given its prominence in the history of criminal law in Britain, and so by extension in Canada’s inherited justice system, the public execution should be remembered with all its injustices and excess. The final chapter, “Ending the Spectacle,” gives us a succinct explanation of what led to the end of public executions in Britain in 1868. One factor was a reduction in the number of capital crimes. Another was the rise of penal colonies. A final factor cited is the rise of a new morality: though rather than a moral concern about state executions per se, it was believed that the public aspect of executions “brutalised society” (p. 135). Abolition would not occur for another hundred years. Executions in Great Britain were mostly abolished in the 1960s and 1970s, with complete abolition not occurring until 1998, when it was removed for treason.

Executions: 700 Years of Public Punishment in London is not meant to be an academic treatise. Rather, this excellent book summarizes over 700 years of history in an accessible and interesting format, full of illustrations of many documents and objects from historical collections that give it an immediacy and human scale. Resisting the temptation to dwell on the salacious or macabre, it is an essential introduction to both the legal and social history of public executions.