The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868

by Vic Gatrell

Hanging people for petty crimes as well as grave, the Bloody Penal Code was at its most active between 1770 and 1830. Some 7,000 men and women were executed on public scaffolds, watched by crowds of thousands.
This acclaimed study is the first to explore what a wide range of people felt about these ceremonies. Gatrell draws on letters, diaries, ballads, broadsides, and images, as well as on poignant appeals for mercy which, until now, have been largely neglected by historians. Panoramic in range, scholarly in method, and compelling in style and in argument, this is one of those rare histories which both shift our sense of the past and speak powerfully to the present.

Genres: History, True Crime, Crime, Nonfiction, British Literature, Politics, Law

656 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 1994

About the author

Vic Gatrell is a social historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

a.k.a. V.A.C. Gatrell

Reviews

[Jane Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive and interesting, displaying copious research and scholarship. But the writing is dreadfully overblown throughout. It's not even an academic style, just over the top; and it spoilt what was otherwise a fascinating account.

[Shake n' Vac]

I would still recommend that this book be read, for all its faults, as Gatrell has researched well and makes good points (many I have sympathy with) albeit, in my opinion, more from the heart than the mind. Sadly, we all have to seem to justify ourselves today, so let me start by saying I am old school left - which is something that should endear me to Gatrell, but it does not. Gatrell is, in a postmoderny way, obsessed by power structures and this book is primarily a rant - not a balanced attempt at discussion - against anything he deems to be oppressive (which, is pretty much everything - I am amazed he did not raise the oppression of hungry birds, denied a peck at gibbeted corpses after the abolition of the practice). That the book is overly long is due to its heavy reliance on 'emotion' - although we must be thankful he did not, in Homeric style, use the epithet of 'the arbitrary murderer of cursed name' each time Peel was mentioned. Ultimately, the good in the book gets a little choked by his need to continually preach. Postmodernists and activists will love it, but it is definitely worth reading for those more open to debate.

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read two other books while reading this, so it took much longer than I expected to finish. But not as long as it would take to fully ingest and analyse the myriad of details and arguments set out in the book. Often it veers from history into psychology, and there's definitely a political bias. Anti-authority, anti-church, anti-government, anti-capital punishment, anti-monarchy; it's one that I share. Others, I suspect, will be less accepting and will accuse Gatrell of partiality. I agree with another reviewer who pointed out the overly-complicated language. Sometimes you have to reread a sentence two or three times before understanding fully what the writer means. And when you do finally grasp it, it is usually something very simple which could have been expressed in far fewer - and less polysyllabic - words. Definitely worth the effort though. Like all of Gatrell's work, it is suffused with learning and humanity.

[Leilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the exception of the section on the elite, Gatrell does an excellent job depicting public hangings, the changing opinions about them, and providing an explanation on why they stopped.