The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England

This is a chapter from A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse edited by Richard Ward. This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license. In this chapter, Zoe Dyndor uses data compiled for the Wellcome Trust funded project, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse, to investigate the logic and rationale behind selecting gibbet locations in eighteenth-century England. She suggests that while gibbets were generally located near to the scene of the crime, there were a number of other factors that led to the selection of particular sites for cases of hanging in chains. Through a case study of smugglers hung in chains in the 1740s, Dyndor demonstrates that, in certain cases, gibbet locations were specifically selected to reflect the nature of the offence, the background of the offender or the circumstances of the crime.

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