Bone and Sickle

Facebook
Tweet
LinkedIn
Cancel

About This Show

Show Info:

A bountiful harvest of horror and folklore.Read more »

@boneandsickle
/boneandsickle
Website

Listen Whenever

iOS
Android
Web Player

Related Shows

The Gibbet, Hanged in Chains

Oct 10 · 46 minutes

Illustration from 1832 broadsheet “Execution of James Cook, and Hung in Chains at Le’ster for the Horrid Murder of Mr. Paas.”The gibbet was a hanging iron cage used to display the corpses of criminals in 18th and early 19th-century England. To be thus “hanged in chains,” in the judicial jargon and thinking of the day, subjected the criminal to an extra measure of postmortem shaming and offered the general public a rather extravagant cautionary example. Naturally, this frightful spectacle also generated a fair measure of folklore, which we explore in this episode as a follow-up to our “Gallows Lore” show. The gibbet was a relatively rare punishment reserved for the crime of murder, and only then used in particularly heinous or high-profile cases. Though it was sometimes employed before 1751, its use was more widespread thanks to The Murder Act instituted that year. This bit of legislation offered this extra punitive measure in response to a sort of inflation of the penal code attaching the death penalty to increasingly minor crimes, such as acts of theft. The Murder Act also designated anatomical dissection of the criminal body as an additional option for postmortem punishment, a fate actually much more common than the gibbet. Dissection may have been intended primarily to enhance physicians’ medical knowledge, but it also provided the surgeons with body parts and substances that could be sold off for other purposes. We make a grisly digression from gibbets to explore some of the ways the human byproducts of executions were made use of in folk-medicine, magic, and certain professions. William Hogarth’s “The Anatomy Lesson (The Reward of Cruelty)” 1751, satirizes a criminal dissection.Next, we get into the details of the gibbetting process. Contrary to common understanding, the gibbet was not simply designed as a sort of narrowed human-sized birdcage. It was an arrangement of customized form-fitting iron bands wrapping the limbs, trunk, and body, and connected with vertical cross-pieces. The cage was suspended in a way that allowed it to rock freely in the wind, lending a sort of eerie animation to the corpse and thereby increasing the terrifying impact of these displays. The horrific impression made by the gibbeted corpse is detailed in Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs, in a scene describing an encounter with a gibbet by the story’s protagonist as a child. Mrs. Karswell reads for us a few lavishly macabre paragraphs from the novel. We follow this with another literary gibbet, one surprisingly found in a now-forgotten series of children’s books by Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family, published in three volumes between 1818 and 1847. Then we hear a typical ghost story told of the gibbet, a tale set down in ballad form as “Old Grindrod’s Ghost,” which first appears in the 1872 collection Ballads, Romantic, Fantastical, and Humorous by the historical novelist William Ains...

Episodes of This Show

Stitcher for Podcasts

Get the Stitcher App

Take your podcasts on-the-go!

Get the Stitcher App

Send a link to your phone to take
your podcasts on the go.

We Sent You a Link

Did you get it?

Retry

Close

Bone and Sickle

About This Show

Listen Whenever

Related Shows

Most Recent Episode

The Gibbet, Hanged in Chains

Episodes of This Show

Stitcher for Podcasts

Get the Stitcher App

Take your podcasts on-the-go!

Get the Stitcher App

Send a link to your phone to take your podcasts on the go.

We Sent You a Link

Did you get it?

Retry

Close

Bone and Sickle

About This Show

Listen Whenever

Related Shows

Most Recent Episode

The Gibbet, Hanged in Chains

Episodes of This Show

Send a link to your phone to take
your podcasts on the go.