Authors:
- Provides the first substantial study of the role that punishing the criminal corpse played in seventeenth and eighteenth century English penal policy
- Analyses the development of attitudes, legislative initiatives and policies in relation to post-execution punishment
- Provides insight into this neglected area of the history of capital punishment
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife (PHSCCA)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book analyses the different types of post-execution punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the origins of the Act, and then explores the ways in which Act was actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at the abandonment of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the rapid decline of hanging in chains just after 1800, and the final abandonment of both dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It concludes that the Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an important role within the broader capital punishment system well into the nineteenth century. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the ‘Bloody Code’ and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’, they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital punishment system – the courts extensive use of aggravated and post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.
Authors and Affiliations
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University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom
Peter King
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840
Book Subtitle: Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England
Authors: Peter King
Series Title: Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51361-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-51360-1Published: 16 December 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-51361-8Published: 06 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2947-6348
Series E-ISSN: 2947-6356
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 212
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations
Topics: Cultural History, History of Britain and Ireland, Crime and Society, History of Science, Social History