evidence came to light that Chalcraft may have been implicated in an earlier
murder at Petersfield, and that both may have been involved in one at
Farnham, where the murder weapon was found to be one of Mr Chennel
senior’s working knives.^11
These cases were unusual in that the penalties were enacted at the place of
the crime. Normally, Surrey murderers would be executed on the roof of the
gatehouse of the county gaol in Horsemonger Lane, Southwark. Gibbets were
at one time a common sight in the countryside, set up at crossroads or other
wellfrequented places, where the sight of the decaying corpse of a hanged
felon might serve to dissuade others from a life of crime. One such stood by a
lane on the edge of Saxilby Moor, near Doddington, holding the remains of a
man called Thomas Temporell (or Tom Otter), who had been executed in 1806
in Lincoln for the murder of his young wife on the day of their marriage. He
had been forced into the marriage by the parish authorities because the young
woman claimed he was the father of her unborn child. Neither man nor wife
were literate–the parish register shows their marks instead, and the witnesses
were parish constables. After the ceremony the pair went towards Lincoln, and
later along the road to Saxilby, but the next morning the body of the wife was
found in a ditch. Temporell was arrested, tried and hanged, having confessed
to the crime. He already had a wife and child living in Southwell.
His body was taken to be hung in irons on a thirtyfoothigh gibbet close to
where the body had been found; the occasion was celebrated by the locals who
erected stalls and made merry at the site. The gibbet stood until 1850 when it
was blown down in a storm, having been weakened by souvenirhunters
cutting pieces off. The remains of the gibbet were eventually taken by a local
doctor to be made into a chair. A part of the iron gibbet cage is now preserved
at Doddington Hall.^12
Many‘Gibbet Hills’can be found across the country, as well as in the US
and Canada; a few have replica gibbet posts still standing, such as Combe
Gibbet in Berkshire. Gibbet irons are also preserved in a number of places,
including in Quebec, Kingston in Jamaica ̧ Leicester, and Rye in Sussex. No
two are exactly alike, having been made by a local blacksmith as occasion
demanded.
There are also many places which record the presence of a gallows, as
mentioned earlier, from the famous site of Tyburn Tree (Figure 28),near
Marble Arch to Gallows Hill, Barnard Castle, and Gallows Hill, Salem,
Massachusetts.
In 1992 archaeologists in Williamsburg, North Carolina, found the remains
of a large triangular gallows about a mile away from the town’s gaol. It was
CRIME IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE