Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  Many more who gained their living by crime emerged as darkness descended, like the creatures of the night that they were. Pickpockets and robbers were everywhere. Even wigs were at risk. Ingenious thieves operating from upper windows employed devices of thin wire fitted with hooks with which they removed wigs and hats from those passing below. Men who were apparently porters would pass by carrying a basket on their shoulder. Invisible inside the basket was a small boy who, in the gloom, would reach out and grasp a wig before, in a flash, disappearing from view inside the basket again.

  An anonymous poet gives a sense of the perils of being abroad in the night-time streets of London:

  The lurking thief, who, while the daylight shone,

  Made the walls echo with his begging tone.

  That crutch, which late compassion mov’d, shall wound

  Thy bleeding head and fell thee to the ground.

  Though thou art tempted by the linkman’s call,

  Yet trust him not along the lonely wall;

  In the mid-way he’ll quench the flaming brand,

  And share the bounty with the pilf’ring band.

  (Burke 1949: 72)

  Another writer giving the same impression was Henry Fielding (1707–54) who described London and Westminster as ‘a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa and Arabia’.

  Despite the fact that London was such a huge city by the standards of the time, to us it would have seemed small and semi-rural. London had spread far beyond the square mile of the City but open fields could still be seen north of Oxford Road at the beginning of the century. Chelsea, Islington and Camberwell, for example, were villages. Parts of present-day Soho were pastureland. In the Whitehall area, development of housing for the rich was taking place around St James’s Square, Piccadilly and towards Hyde Park where it petered out. Concern was being expressed about the seemingly never-ending outward growth of London. Measures were enacted by Parliament in 1550, 1641, 1703 and again in 1785 to prevent suburban expansion outside the City. However, London seemed to have a life of its own, an unrelenting compulsion for growth that could not be prevented merely by passing legislation.

  Nearly all newcomers to London quickly developed a chronic cough because the air was heavily polluted with the smoke from sea coal, burnt in innumerable domestic and industrial grates. Many soon succumbed, although not necessarily fatally, to the contagious endemic and epidemic diseases that flourished in London’s airless, overcrowded and insanitary conditions. The lodgings they found provided cold comfort. As Dr Johnson said, ‘falling houses thunder on your head’. Jerry-built dwellings sometimes suddenly collapsed into the street with fatal results. People headed for London because wages were better there than in the provinces but they often returned home as quickly as they could if opportunities presented themselves. This lent the population of London a fleeting, changing, volatile character. Provincial visitors commented on the moral dangers presented by life in London. They were disturbed by the fact that the seemingly eternal, reassuring certainties of English life elsewhere did not apply in the capital. London’s ‘lower orders’ were masterless and largely lacking in the sense of deference to their social superiors that the latter thought provided the matrix necessary for social stability.

  London was full of vigour and vitality. It never slept. It was extremely violent. In the city and its vicinity lurked the ever-present threat of assault by highwaymen, footpads and robbers of every description. Many popular recreations employed violence. Cock-fighting, throwing at cocks, the baiting of animals and bare-knuckle boxing attracted boisterous, drunken crowds almost demented with excitement, passions running so high that fighting frequently spread to the spectators. The London mob was irreverent towards authority, volatile, often ferocious and cruel. While the pretensions of fashionable dandies were mercilessly mocked, infirm and other vulnerable individuals such as foreigners found themselves the butt of derision and physical bullying. In the early part of the century the Mohocks, youngish men of the rich and leisured class, drank heavily and then roamed the streets looking for trouble. They seized women and forced them to stand upside down, often with their heads in barrels. Their skirts billowed down and caused them considerable embarrassment because few women at the time wore drawers. They might be pricked in their legs with swords or poked in their private parts. Sometimes they were raped. Men were often beaten up or had their noses broken or eyes bored out. Occasionally the Mohocks placed their victims in wooden casks and rolled them into the Thames.

  Senseless violence and murder were everyday features of life in London. Life was considered cheap and pleasure was extracted from the sufferings of others. For a few pence, voyeurs could go and jeer at the antics of the crazed inmates of Bedlam, a repository for the mentally ill and for general misfits. They plied them with drink and incited them to perform obscene acts. Many people obtained great pleasure from a Sunday afternoon stroll to observe the rotting corpses of executed criminals hanging in cages on gibbets. Large crowds turned out to taunt people in the pillory, especially if their crimes excited popular disgust. They not only cast verbal insults but often subjected them to a ferocious rain of stones, bottles, rotting vegetables, decomposing domestic pets, excrement, mud and other noisome material. Best of all the entertainments was, of course, Tyburn Fair, the eight hanging days set aside each year when a carnival atmosphere prevailed and vast crowds turned out to watch the procession from Newgate to Tyburn and its eagerly anticipated climax, the death trauma on the scaffold of one or more criminals.

  London possessed a distinctive ‘criminal class’, a substantial but not easily quantified minority that obtained its living largely or entirely by illegal activity. This class had its own subculture, mores and language, a criminal cant designed to allow communication while excluding outsiders. Highly organised, this underworld was rightfully seen by outsiders as threatening. A more nebulous grouping was that which moved between criminal and legal methods of making a living, depending on many factors, not least of which was the state of the economy. Elsewhere in Britain there was of course lawlessness but much of it, such as poaching and smuggling, enjoyed widespread public support. Such ‘social crime’ was very different from the anti-social activity of London’s underworld whose depredations affected rich and poor alike.

  The city was unlike anywhere else in the kingdom. Its size, the anonymity it offered, its cosmopolitan population, its rapidly growing wealth in the eighteenth century and its stark contrasts between generalised poverty and the conspicuous consumption of the rich all helped to make it the natural focus for criminals. In his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increases of Robbers, Henry Fielding neatly summed up London’s uniqueness:

  Whoever indeed considers the cities of London and Westminster with the late vast additions of their suburbs, the great irregularity of their buildings, the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts and bye-places; must think that, had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could scarcely have been better contrived.

  In spite of a diverse economic base, London suffered severe trade fluctuations that brought unemployment and the hardship associated with it. These conditions lured into criminal activity numbers of people who otherwise lived largely within the law. There was also the more imprecise factors of anomie, of transience, of a sense of helplessness. London’s sheer size, noise and constant activity may have created stresses among its population which added to the apparent inability of many of its inhabitants to exercise any real control over their lives.

  Professional thieves found conditions in London in the early part of the eighteenth century particularly favourable. Their activities were supported by a sophisticated, efficient network of receivers who had few scruples concerning the provenance of the goods they were offered. The planning of robberies and negotiations with these receivers frequently took place in ‘flash houses’, usually drinking places located in the rookeries where all
concerned enjoyed virtual immunity from the authorities.

  Much crime, however, was opportunistic and the result of the dire conditions in which its perpetrators found themselves rather than the work of hardened recidivists. The ragged specimens of humanity that shuffled in front of the magistrates each working morning were hopeless and often helpless victims of circumstance. Desperation had led them to theft and robbery and many of them even lacked the skills to commit these effectively. Much of this miserable flotsam and jetsam consisted of women. There was a considerable if variable and capricious demand for female labour in London, especially in its extremely large service sector. Huge numbers of girls gravitated to the metropolis in search of work. A few made a success of things. Far more found that life was a hand-to-mouth, lonely struggle, in and out of poorly paid, unskilled work with periods of appalling deprivation threatening in the bad times. Many had little or no alternative but to turn to prostitution, crime or both.

  In Industry and Idleness (1747), William Hogarth illustrates what he saw as the rewards that London offered the diligent and the temptations it presented to the easily led. He traces the divergent lives of Francis Goodchild, the industrious apprentice and Tom Idle, the feckless ne’er-do-well. Goodchild makes the most of his chances and rises to wealth and prestige. Idle, however, starts down the road to perdition by gambling on the Sabbath and then finds himself sucked into an awful maelstrom of degradation and despair. What Hogarth ignores is the fact that many of the nameless thousands of Londoners who lived in permanent want, misery and despair, had never had the opportunity to make anything of life in the first place.

  The nature and volume of crime in London reflected wider socio-economic and cultural change. The eighteenth century was pre-eminently the age of drink and the effects of alcohol abuse on criminal activity were all too evident. From around 1690 to the 1750s the villain of the piece was gin. The Dutch were extremely fond of gin but hitherto it had been little known outside the Netherlands. In 1688 the highly unpopular King James II was deposed. The crown was offered to the most acceptable claimant in the circumstances who was James II’s daughter Mary, along with her husband, Prince William of Orange, as consort. The accession to the throne of a Dutchman did not meet with universal approval but it led, among other things, to a revolution in drinking habits accompanied by an explosion of crime and, indirectly, to substantial numbers of miscreants meeting their Maker at Tyburn.

  From 1690 onwards Parliament approved a number of measures directly encouraging the distilling of spirits made from English grain. King William provided a fine example to his new subjects and led from the front, consuming prodigious amounts of gin. Drinking gin showed loyalty to the new monarch and was patriotic. Soon gin overtook ale and beer as the drink of the people. It was cheaper and its inebriating effects were more immediate. In 1688 the English consumed about half a million gallons annually. By 1700 they drank four times as much. The government was happy because the sale of gin produced revenue for the government and benefited the farmers. It could not, however, have predicted what happened over the next fifty years. By 1733 in London alone 11 million gallons of gin were produced, this being about twenty-three times as much as had been produced throughout England and Wales in 1688. This figure, however, is only an official one and takes no account of the vast quantities of adulterated gin produced cheaply in innumerable illicit stills. This liquid filth had just two virtues: it was cheap and it brought quick oblivion.

  Gin provided short-lived respite for people whose surroundings were comfortless and whose lives were characterised by deprivation and despair. In St Giles, one of the most notorious of London’s rookeries, it was estimated that in 1750 one house in every four sold drink. All classes drank, there being no stigma attached to drunkenness, but the effects of the excessive drinking of the poorer sections of society were more likely to be seen in public and were therefore much more evident. Drunks reeled around the streets, colliding with obstacles, sometimes being run down by riders and carriages or collapsing insensible in the filth that was heaped up everywhere. Many, hopelessly addicted and deprived of the will to do anything positive, drank until they made themselves unconscious or the money ran out and then turned to casual crime in order to pay for the next drink.

  In 1751 two powerful pieces of propaganda made a considerable impression on informed opinion. The first was William Hogarth’s famous contrasting prints entitled Gin Lane and Beer Street. These provided a graphic portrayal of the moral and physical decay linked with the abuse of gin and the robust well-being associated with the moderate drinking of beer. Second was Henry Fielding’s essay An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increases of Robbers. Fielding was a highly respected magistrate who explained clearly and simply that much of the criminality he dealt with was caused by the abuse of gin. In 1751 the government prohibited the sale of gin by distillers, by chandlers and grocers and workhouse-keepers. It also increased the duty on spirits thereby depriving gin of its price advantage over beer and ale. Gradually the amount of gin that was consumed declined as did the corresponding death rate.

  Over the eighteenth century as a whole, many factors can be seen to have had an effect on levels and types of crime. The streets of London were better lit by the 1790s. This made street crime more hazardous for its perpetrators. By 1800 street robbery had declined while burglary was on the increase. Society as a whole was becoming less violent. Doubt was being cast on the efficacy of the ‘Bloody Code’, itself extremely violent, as a means of deterring crime. Ideas associated with the Enlightenment stressed the rational side of human nature and argued that increased knowledge could be applied to bring about substantial improvements in the human condition.

  London underwent a massive transformation in the course of the century. Its population continued to grow although now at a slower rate than some of the places where manufacturing industries were being established. The area under bricks and mortar spread rapidly as many inhabitants of the City left for the more salubrious outer areas while there was a continuous migration into London by those seeking better financial prospects. London was the heart of the country’s government and legal affairs, the focus of the country’s finance and commerce, its literary and intellectual life, the centre of fashionable social activity and it offered the best shopping opportunities in England. However, the economic base of London was changing and while new industries continued to be established, manufacturing industry became relatively less important. London grew more rapidly as a financial centre, as a port and as the location for the developing apparatus of the state. This changed the composition of occupations and incomes and led to relative gentrification.

  This process may have had a bearing on the marked contrast between the earlier and the later eighteenth century. The death rate, for example, began to fall gradually after 1750 and quite sharply from the 1780s. Visitors commented on an apparent reduction in the uncouth behaviour of those moving around London’s streets, a phenomenon which may have had something to do with the work of inspirational magistrates such as Colonel de Veil and the Fielding brothers. These men tried to identify the causes of crime and advocated social reform as a means of tackling the poverty and deprivation which were at the root of much criminal activity. They also had a great deal to do with the establishment of a paid and permanent police force, a visible force on the streets to deter crime and provide citizens with some sense of security.

  The organs of local government too underwent improvement in the eighteenth century. The vestries of the parishes surrounding the City obtained legal powers to enable them to raise money for watch purposes, to provide lighting and street-cleaning and to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. They effected a very considerable improvement, so much so that a guide book to London in 1802 stated: ‘We venture to assert that no city in proportion to its trade and luxury is more free from danger to those who pass the streets at all hours, or from depredations, open or concealed, on property’.

  In the early part of the eigh
teenth century, crime, disorder and violence had stalked the streets of London and the general belief was that crime was out of control. The weakness of the forces of law and order meant that few offenders were apprehended. Instead the law turned with apparently barbaric ferocity on those who were actually arrested and convicted. The penalty for an ever-increasing range of crimes was hanging, intended to act as a deterrent to potential offenders. At the end of the century, however, opinion in ruling circles was turning away from such an overtly vindictive penal code. Consideration was being given to alternative ways of dealing with what was seen as the continuing threat to life and property posed by the ‘criminal classes’. Hangings at Tyburn and the ritual enactments associated with them had ceased and had been moved to the much more easily controlled area outside Newgate. Opinion had also moved against the systematic infliction of cruelty on animals. The Fielding brothers, the reforming magistrates, for example, had initiated action against throwing at cocks and increasingly such pastimes became punishable offences. The nineteenth century was to see the introduction of professional policing, the development of modern prisons and the concept of custodial sentencing. It also witnessed far-reaching efforts to control those occasions on which huge, boisterous and potentially unmanageable crowds congregated, be it as spectators of sporting activities or as participants in various forms of political activity. Change was the very dynamic of London life.