The author’s attempts to portray an alternative viewpoint are immediately apparent. Opening his account with a dramatic quotation describing one of the King’s justices reading out a court verdict to a near-spiritless prisoner, Linebaugh provides us with a view of the contemporary legal system’s aims – namely, to inspire “terror, majesty, dread and some pity” in the hearts of the local population. He instantly attacks this account, however, claiming instead that there was a prevailing atmosphere of “irreverence, humour and defiance.” Linebaugh’s justification for such a claim is primarily linguistic in nature; he goes on to list a host of humorous words related to hanging. The phrases “to cry cockles”, “to be…frummagemmed”, and “to ride a horse foaled by an acorn” each serve to colourfully illustrate a more defiant and less serious public conception of the noose. This claim exhibits an element of inconsistency, however, when compared with what the author explicitly points out in his penultimate paragraph: that these offenders’ deaths are, in fact, shown as anything but unimportant to society. Linebaugh points out that the common social demographic of those hanged is that of a young, fertile worker and family member. Thus, he labels a death through hanging as a “sentimental loss” as well as one of “deep moral and material consequence”. He even chooses to use the phrase “death crisis” to describe the consequences of a hanging. Linebaugh makes it clear, therefore, that death by hanging was not viewed with indifference.

Despite the inconsistency that can be found between Linebaugh’s two accounts of humour and seriousness, it is clear that in both cases he seeks to challenge the established viewpoints of terror and callousness. He continues to challenge the notion of callous indifference throughout the account, citing evidence for what he sees as an air of intense decency and respect at the gallows. The fact that hangings were “treated as a type of wedding” serves to emphasise the prevalence of this atmosphere. Condemned prisoners went to their deaths wearing their finest clothes, as is found in the case of John Raymond, who wrote his relatives asking for “some white clothes to appear in on the morning he was to suffer”, or George Anderson, who was hanged in breeches with black ferret trimmings. These men were clearly not spiritless, as the King’s justice’s words on the opening page would suggest. On the contrary, Linebaugh argues, dignity was kept to the very end.

Respect, so inextricably bound up with decency and dignity, is also found with no shortage at the Tyburn gallows. It came, as Linebaugh puts forward, in many forms. One such form of respect can be illustrated by the “need for proper treatment of the dead” arising from the labouring class’s superstitions directed towards the dead, fearing they might rise again “to haunt” them. This was as likely to have stemmed from religious beliefs as from actual resurrections, in which an incomplete hanging would give rise to the victim’s revival. Belief in the healing power of the corpse is further evidence for another form of respect held for the dead. It was thought that if a child was stroked by the hand of an executed criminal, he or she would be guaranteed good health, and that the same hand could cure ulcers, cancerous growths, bleeding tumours, and even a woman’s infertility. This type of action, Linebaugh writes, “honours the power of the felon’s corpse”. In this sense, he interprets these practises and beliefs, labelled in our time as “bad taste” and superstition, instead as pain-relieving techniques for the peace of the living and methods for laying the dead to a respectful rest. In fact, he explicitly relates superstition to respect, calling the crowd’s actions a “respectful treatment” of the dead.

This respect for the dead found widespread in the Mob is not, however, borne out in Linebaugh’s descriptions of the medical surgeons and legal practitioners of the time. The former concerned only with furthering medical research and the latter with “aggravating capital punishment”, it is clear to Linebaugh that only the lower class crowd was concerned with the proper treatment of the convicted. This quasi-symbiotic relationship between surgeons, who “humiliat[ed]” the dead, and lawmakers, who relied on this humiliation to worsen their sentences, became “a main cause” of the riots and disturbances witnessed at Tyburn. The wide scale of these anti-surgeon and anti-authority riots can be seen as strong additional evidence for the common respect held for the dead.

It must be noted that the contemporary citizens’ unwillingness to interfere with nature, exemplified by their resentment of the surgeons’ practise, can be strongly compared to another medical issue today: that of stem cell research. Again, in the year 2005, protests are held on moral grounds against the scientific community’s interference into the realm of the medical unknown. In this way, this parallel drawn between eighteenth-century England and our twenty-first century society serves to support the thesis that sees humans as essentially the same creatures today as they were in the past.

Linebaugh’s article therefore serves two main purposes. Explicitly, he argues against common conceptions of the poor in eighteenth-century England in light of their views towards capital punishment, suggesting that instead of feeling callous and indifferent they were respectful and mourning. Implicitly, Linebaugh succeeds in pointing out an element of universality in the nature of humanity and human dignity across history.

Plan/Draft Items

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Comments
• Evaluation
• Description of text
• Interpretation of text
• Critical Analysis
• Purpose – TO DISPEL MYTHS?
• Thesis of text
• The text clearly seeks to inform
• As exhibited by the opening paragraph… to dispel common myths of how hangings proceeded, were viewed, and worked as part of English society
• To point out common elements of humanity, throughout humanity. To show that people are essentially the same. Again, the myth that it was everyday and unimportant is argued against: even though death was commonplace in 18th Century England, its impact on society was, nevertheless, unarguably felt.
• Contrast lack of spirit in opening paragraph with intense dignity, pride at end of article.
• He points out that hanging is not deeply studied, and thus that stereotypes emerge
• To point out the essential humanity
• The importance of the poor
• The conflicting values held by the society (scientific vs. moral)
• As an interpretation of alternative documents – that history is not only about official government sources
• Approach
• Social – with the waves of riots. Looks at the issue in the context of social change.
• Literary (with all the language stuff)
• Cultural – study of humanity, but of a specific culture and how it relates to our culture
• Legal/justice
• RELATE THIS TO AUTHOR’S THESIS
• Fact or Opinion
• Clearly both. Opinion is implicit, through the use of facts in arguments.
• Convincing Argument
• The argument is almost by definition convincing: the mere fact that it exists to dispel myths and point out where others have fallen means that if we do not doubt the author’s factual accuracy, there is little else with which we can argue. If its facts are to be taken seriously (and, with a certain trust in the facts we are given) it follows that we have to take the argument seriously. The views put forward are
• Theoretical Issues/Concerns and Topics for Further discussion
• Parallels drawn to present day with stem cell research
• Own Reactions
• Interesting to see parallels played out through time etc

Part I

1. Gives traditional government account of what hanging is (65)
2. Says that this account is not borne out by his sources (66)
3. Talks about hanging in the contemporary language (66)
4. Emphasises public nature of hanging (67)
5. Introduces the concept of riots (67)
6. Hanging as exercising state power (67-68)
7. Historiography and other authors’ shortcomings on the subject (68)
8. Question: why riot and disorder? (69)
9. Answer: physicians’ fault (69)

Part II

1. Established demand for corpses due to rapidly changing nature of medical practise (70)
2. Legal means of obtaining corpses insufficient (70-71)
3. Widespread practise of grave-digging and penalties for it (71-72)
4. Change in attitude towards commercialising the dead body (72)
5. Argument of scientific utility: criminals giving back to society (72-73)
6. ‘Health and sound Limbs’ vs. “Scum of the People”: dishonour punishment (73)
7. Cost of dissections (73-74)
8. Petition and proposed Act of Parliament (74-75)
9. Deploying soldiers to safeguard hangings (76)
10. Dissection as aggravating capital punishment: Murder Act (76)
11. Private work (not public) as the main scientific driving force (78)
12. End of obtaining hanged corpses from gallows mid-century (78)

Part III

1. The Mob as family, friends, workers, Irish, sailors (79)
2. Families (79-80)
3. Friends (80-82)
4. Co-workers (82-83)
5. Irish (84-86)
6. Sailors (86-89)

Part IV

1. Penlez Riots of July 1749 related to unemployment & riotous sailors (89-91)
2. Fielding’s ill-judged policy of military riot suppression (91)
3. Mob action with sailors as primary crowd members (92)
4. Penlez caught (93)
5. Opposition against hanging Penlez (94)
6. Fielding as not corrupt (95)
7. MP’s failure to support Penlez (96-97)
8. Attempted convict gunpowder escape/revolt (98)
9. Keeping order at a price (99)
10. Janssen’s shift away from military suppression (100-101)
11. Potentiality for flash-riot from disturbance (101)

Part V

1. Introduction to evaluation of surgeon’s struggle against the poor (102)
2. Death as commonplace at the time (102)
3. Resurrection due to incomplete hangings (102-106)
4. Criminal not re-hanged, but transported to America as example of humanity (104)
5. Resurrection as superstitious & haunting (106-107)
6. Superstition vs. social action as with similar functions (108)
7. The dead as healers (109)
8. Emphasis of powers of the felon’s corpse vs. the humiliation of it (110)
9. Gallows compared to weddings  respect & dignity in death (111-112)
10. Other deaths like weddings: virgin or childless woman (113)
11. Hanging unofficially annulled by marriage (114)
12. Summary & emphasis of complexity in views towards the dead (115)

Part VI

1. Historiographical argument against callousness and indifference to death (116)
2. The crowd’s respectful treatment of the dead (116)
3. Death as a crisis & social vacuum: sentimental, moral, and material loss (116)
4. What we call “Superstition” as, instead, a formalisation and elaboration of funeral rites (116)
5. “Ignominy” of the law; violation of customs through dissection (117)
6. The Mob as fighting for decency of the dead, peace of the living (117)