In The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons, Peter Linebaugh puts forward an alternative viewpoint on the issue of public hangings in eighteenth-century England: specifically, that death by hanging was not, as other historians have put forward, viewed with callousness and fear by the working class. Rather, he portrays the “Mob” as engaged in a struggle for the peace of the living and the preserved decency of, and respect for, the dead. In doing this, he not only takes issue with what he sees as a traditional and generalised line of historical knowledge, but also highlights what can be interpreted as timeless and universal human values.