Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (16 page)

M
any of those who died at Tyburn in the eighteenth century were residents, even if only recent ones, of the capital. What sights, sounds and smells assailed those living in London in this period and what were the various hazards to which the people passing through its streets might find themselves subjected? London was like a living organism and as such was dynamic and ever-changing. The last hangings at Tyburn took place in 1783. What factors had affected changes in crime and the ways in which it was dealt with in this period?

In 1700 England’s population was around 5 million. Most people lived in the countryside and obtained their livelihood from agricultural activity. Something like 550,000 people lived in London in 1700. This number rose rapidly throughout the eighteenth century and constituted about one-tenth of the total population of England. During the century London’s population grew largely because of inward migration. Its dominance over the rest of the kingdom is shown by the fact that Norwich, the second largest city in 1700, is estimated to have had a population of less than 30,000.

The eighteenth century did not get off to a propitious start when, in November 1703, London suffered the greatest storm on record. This appalling storm lasted nine hours without abating. During the night, many ships on the Thames were driven from their moorings and wrecked on the banks of the river; barges were driven against the arches of London Bridge and reduced to matchwood; four hundred watermen’s wherries sank or were likewise smashed to smithereens. Two thousand chimneys crashed through roofs or fell into the streets and yards below. Churches lost their spires while houses lost their roofs. Numerous buildings collapsed. Many of those foolish enough to be on the streets in these turbulent conditions were killed by falling debris. Tragedy and disaster were never far away on the streets of London.

London in the early part of the eighteenth century had two main centres, the City and Westminster. The continuously built-up area strikes today’s observer as small in extent but densely occupied and overcrowded. It was filthy, pestilential, noisy and vibrant with activity. The mansions of the rich were cheek-by-jowl with the slums of the poor. Narrow, ill-lit and poorly paved, the streets were awash with filth of every description. The ordure which coated London’s streets was valued by the market gardeners who used it as fertiliser. As Liza Picard put it, ‘It was a rich, glutinous mixture of animal manure, dead cats and dogs, ashes, straw and human excrement’ (Picard 2000: 10). Drinking water was contaminated and could be lethal. The mortality rate was higher than it had been a century earlier. Only one in two children survived beyond the age of fifteen. Diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox prospered in the overcrowded, insanitary conditions. Dark, sinister alleys led off into rookeries or ‘sanctuaries’ where the underworld of the metropolis planned its criminal activities, divided the spoils and lived, procreated, drank and died. Such areas were rarely penetrated by the forces of law and order. When they were, every hand was against them. Animals, many of them semi-feral, were everywhere, rooting through the rubbish and adding to the cacophony and confusion. London, especially to the eyes of a provincial visitor, would have seemed exciting, confusing and threatening.

By daytime, the streets presented a curiously mixed picture of luxury and dirt, bright colours and ingrained grime, riches and rags. Wealthy men and women dressed in luxuriant finery and showed off their opulent gilded coaches, the often gaudy liveries of their footmen and their black African pages. Eye-catching signs hung above the doors of shops, taverns and drinking places and also of many houses. The splashes of colour created by all these elements contrasted with the layers of dust or mud – depending on the time of the year – which encrusted the streets and lower parts of the buildings. They would also have contrasted with the drab and ragged appearance of those who shuffled listlessly through the streets with nowhere to go. Others, moving quickly and with more sense of purpose, bawled and hawked their wares from door to door or went about other pressing business. Many were thieves and robbers who obtained rich rewards for their efforts in the teeming, chaotic thoroughfares.

These streets, the dangers of which during daylight hours included recklessly driven horse-drawn vehicles and careless riders, pugnacious young bucks keen to espy an insult and demand a duel to restore honour, and closely pressed crowds containing highly-skilled robbers and pickpockets, became infinitely more hazardous during the hours of darkness. While lighting in the major streets improved considerably during the eighteenth century, William Hogarth in ‘Night’, the last part of his series
The Four Times of the Day
, published in 1738, gives a realistic impression of a street scene on a moonlit night in the Charing Cross district. It is Oak Apple Day, celebrating the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and acorns and oak leaves can be seen decorating shop signs and the hats of passers-by. Hogarth depicts a narrow, crowded street in which the Salisbury stagecoach has overturned on hitting a celebratory bonfire lit, with scant consideration for others, right in the middle of the street. While its woebegone occupants try to extricate themselves from the wreckage, a drunken and confused freemason is being led home from his lodge by an attendant only to be soused by the contents of a chamber-pot which has been jettisoned with characteristic abandon from an upper window. Like so many of the characters that Hogarth uses in these works, the freemason can be identified as Colonel Thomas de Veil, a magistrate and freemason of whom Hogarth disapproved.

Other dangers lurked in the streets. Costermongers and pedlars pushed their barrows through the streets with little concern for anyone else while noisily bawling their wares. Sometimes dangerous animals such as bulls ran amok and horses shied and got out of control. Pedestrians tried to walk as close as possible to the walls of the buildings lining the street. This could lead to acrimonious arguments and fights with others trying to do the same. Traffic jams of monumental proportions often blocked the way, not least when drovers chose to herd livestock such as flocks of turkeys or screeching geese through the general mêlée. Angry road-users yelled and shouted at each other. Iron-rimmed wheels resonated excruciatingly where the streets were composed of cobbles or setts. The cacophony on London’s streets must have been almost intolerable.

Many more who gained their living by crime emerged as darkness descended, like the creatures of the night that they were. Pickpockets and robbers were everywhere. Even wigs were at risk. Ingenious thieves operating from upper windows employed devices of thin wire fitted with hooks with which they removed wigs and hats from those passing below. Men who were apparently porters would pass by carrying a basket on their shoulder. Invisible inside the basket was a small boy who, in the gloom, would reach out and grasp a wig before, in a flash, disappearing from view inside the basket again.

An anonymous poet gives a sense of the perils of being abroad in the night-time streets of London:

The lurking thief, who, while the daylight shone,
Made the walls echo with his begging tone.
That crutch, which late compassion mov’d, shall wound
Thy bleeding head and fell thee to the ground.
Though thou art tempted by the linkman’s call,
Yet trust him not along the lonely wall;
In the mid-way he’ll quench the flaming brand,
And share the bounty with the pilf’ring band.

(Burke 1949: 72)

Another writer giving the same impression was Henry Fielding (1707–54) who described London and Westminster as ‘a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa and Arabia’.

Despite the fact that London was such a huge city by the standards of the time, to us it would have seemed small and semi-rural. London had spread far beyond the square mile of the City but open fields could still be seen north of Oxford Road at the beginning of the century. Chelsea, Islington and Camberwell, for example, were villages. Parts of present-day Soho were pastureland. In the Whitehall area, development of housing for the rich was taking place around St James’s Square, Piccadilly and towards Hyde Park where it petered out. Concern was being expressed about the seemingly never-ending outward growth of London. Measures were enacted by Parliament in 1550, 1641, 1703 and again in 1785 to prevent suburban expansion outside the City. However, London seemed to have a life of its own, an unrelenting compulsion for growth that could not be prevented merely by passing legislation.

Nearly all newcomers to London quickly developed a chronic cough because the air was heavily polluted with the smoke from sea coal, burnt in innumerable domestic and industrial grates. Many soon succumbed, although not necessarily fatally, to the contagious endemic and epidemic diseases that flourished in London’s airless, overcrowded and insanitary conditions. The lodgings they found provided cold comfort. As Dr Johnson said, ‘falling houses thunder on your head’. Jerry-built dwellings sometimes suddenly collapsed into the street with fatal results. People headed for London because wages were better there than in the provinces but they often returned home as quickly as they could if opportunities presented themselves. This lent the population of London a fleeting, changing, volatile character. Provincial visitors commented on the moral dangers presented by life in London. They were disturbed by the fact that the seemingly eternal, reassuring certainties of English life elsewhere did not apply in the capital. London’s ‘lower orders’ were masterless and largely lacking in the sense of deference to their social superiors that the latter thought provided the matrix necessary for social stability.

London was full of vigour and vitality. It never slept. It was extremely violent. In the city and its vicinity lurked the ever-present threat of assault by highwaymen, footpads and robbers of every description. Many popular recreations employed violence. Cock-fighting, throwing at cocks, the baiting of animals and bare-knuckle boxing attracted boisterous, drunken crowds almost demented with excitement, passions running so high that fighting frequently spread to the spectators. The London mob was irreverent towards authority, volatile, often ferocious and cruel. While the pretensions of fashionable dandies were mercilessly mocked, infirm and other vulnerable individuals such as foreigners found themselves the butt of derision and physical bullying. In the early part of the century the Mohocks, youngish men of the rich and leisured class, drank heavily and then roamed the streets looking for trouble. They seized women and forced them to stand upside down, often with their heads in barrels. Their skirts billowed down and caused them considerable embarrassment because few women at the time wore drawers. They might be pricked in their legs with swords or poked in their private parts. Sometimes they were raped. Men were often beaten up or had their noses broken or eyes bored out. Occasionally the Mohocks placed their victims in wooden casks and rolled them into the Thames.

Senseless violence and murder were everyday features of life in London. Life was considered cheap and pleasure was extracted from the sufferings of others. For a few pence, voyeurs could go and jeer at the antics of the crazed inmates of Bedlam, a repository for the mentally ill and for general misfits. They plied them with drink and incited them to perform obscene acts. Many people obtained great pleasure from a Sunday afternoon stroll to observe the rotting corpses of executed criminals hanging in cages on gibbets. Large crowds turned out to taunt people in the pillory, especially if their crimes excited popular disgust. They not only cast verbal insults but often subjected them to a ferocious rain of stones, bottles, rotting vegetables, decomposing domestic pets, excrement, mud and other noisome material. Best of all the entertainments was, of course, Tyburn Fair, the eight hanging days set aside each year when a carnival atmosphere prevailed and vast crowds turned out to watch the procession from Newgate to Tyburn and its eagerly anticipated climax, the death trauma on the scaffold of one or more criminals.

London possessed a distinctive ‘criminal class’, a substantial but not easily quantified minority that obtained its living largely or entirely by illegal activity. This class had its own subculture, mores and language, a criminal cant designed to allow communication while excluding outsiders. Highly organised, this underworld was rightfully seen by outsiders as threatening. A more nebulous grouping was that which moved between criminal and legal methods of making a living, depending on many factors, not least of which was the state of the economy. Elsewhere in Britain there was of course lawlessness but much of it, such as poaching and smuggling, enjoyed widespread public support. Such ‘social crime’ was very different from the anti-social activity of London’s underworld whose depredations affected rich and poor alike.

The city was unlike anywhere else in the kingdom. Its size, the anonymity it offered, its cosmopolitan population, its rapidly growing wealth in the eighteenth century and its stark contrasts between generalised poverty and the conspicuous consumption of the rich all helped to make it the natural focus for criminals. In his
Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increases of Robbers
, Henry Fielding neatly summed up London’s uniqueness:

Whoever indeed considers the cities of London and Westminster with the late vast additions of their suburbs, the great irregularity of their buildings, the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts and bye-places; must think that, had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could scarcely have been better contrived.

In spite of a diverse economic base, London suffered severe trade fluctuations that brought unemployment and the hardship associated with it. These conditions lured into criminal activity numbers of people who otherwise lived largely within the law. There was also the more imprecise factors of anomie, of transience, of a sense of helplessness. London’s sheer size, noise and constant activity may have created stresses among its population which added to the apparent inability of many of its inhabitants to exercise any real control over their lives.