I’ve been looking for a more appropriate place to post something inspired by comments of Bad Bungle’s on the
Creepy Small Villages thread – I don’t want to take that one off tangent, and this looks like the right place.
So, to lighten the mood of fear and anxiety during these unprecedented times – let’s talk about hanging up dead bodies in big iron cages
...In 1773 a man called Corbet forced entry into a cottage, accompanied by his dog, and killed the occupier - but left his dog shut in behind. The Constable next morning let the dog out and followed it to his Master, who was duly condemned and hanged. After the hanging the body was encased in irons and strung up on the arm of the gibbet (whose post was 18 feet high) as a deterrent and subsequent tourist attraction. Despite numerous complaints from Villagers of the sight outside their bedroom windows (and the smell), the corpse remained in the gibbet for another 20 years...
This is going to go off on a bit of a tangent from Bad Bungle’s post, but it's connected, and it’s something that's intrigued me for a while, and for which I've not really been able to find a definitive answer.
Here's a photo of a locally infamous gibbet site not far from me, and on the route of one of my favourite walks - Peter’s Stone, on Wardlow Mires, near the village of Litton in the Peak District:
So, the story is (and it seems well backed up by official records) that at this place a murderer named Antony Lingard was the last man in Derbyshire to be gibbeted
after death. It’s probably safe to say that the assumption is that the gibbet was actually sited on Peter’s Stone, the stump of limestone you can see in the middle distance - and if so, it would certainly have made an impression on passing travellers - but it’s not so easy to get up there, so I think there’s maybe a possibility that it was just in the vicinity.
However, there’s also a similar legend centred quite nearby (this time, without any real documentary back-up) – that the last
live gibbeting in Derbyshire (and, it’s sometimes stated, England) took place on the aptly named Gibbet Moor just to the east of Chatsworth House, and that pressure from the Duke of Devonshire – who objected to the wailing of the gibbeted man – was one of the reasons that live gibbeting was done away with.
And here - eventually - I’m coming to a point. It’s obvious that many people assume that gibbeting was something that was done to live, as well as dead, criminals. However, although the latter was very clearly a thing, I can’t find any record, apart from in apocryphal tales and local lore, that live gibbeting
ever took place – at least in England - and I wonder if this is another example of a commonly accepted historical reality actually being a product of popular imagination inspired and influenced by elements like local lore, Gothic romance and Hammer Horror.
I also have some possible practical objections.
Firstly, there was no police force during the period that gibbeting took place. In the case of Antony Lingard, it was a military escort that took his body to the gibbet site, but I doubt that they had the resources to hang around (no pun intended) until the poor bugger starved to death or died of hypothermia - and the idea that a live criminal would be simply be left unguarded and therefore open to rescue by family, friends or criminal associates, seems unlikely, especially when the authorities made considerable efforts to prevent such things occurring in other situations.
Secondly, and possibly more importantly – I believe that the close fitting iron cages we associate with the practice would quite quickly lead to anyone imprisoned in one suffering from what is commonly called ‘suspension trauma’. There’s some argument about the accuracy of that description, but not about the syndrome, which will can leave the victim unconscious within twenty minutes or so – possibly much sooner – and prone to cerebral hypoxia and death. The syndrome is usually associated with a person hanging under their own bodyweight (hence the reason it is known in my own working circles as Harness Hang Syndrome); however, thinking back to my own training - which is, admittedly, quite a long time ago now - and checking out definitions on the net, I'm pretty sure that severely restricted movement while held in an upright position, and without the body being directly attached to the method of suspension, can induce similar issues.
So – a question: Many of us have probably heard tales of live gibbeting, and have grown up accepting it as a reality, but has anyone ever seen an actual legal or historical record of it ever taking place anywhere in the British isles?