ales and gin, trinkets, gewgaws and souvenirs; newspapers, sermons, tracts, serialized novels. Objects of Curiosity, experienced for a penny. You had festoonery, drums, trumpets – for a time, the Sheriff would order the trumpets and drums to drown out a traitor’s last words. When higher-ups forbade that tactic, he resorted to physical intimidation and discouragement. Many an unrepentant Jacobite’s dying words were interrupted by a punch to the kidney.
The crowd could fairly be called a mob, but without the connotation of violence. Very little blood-lust, but what an appetite for spectacle. Cheering and exhorting the executioner. The roar when the cart was drawn out from under a notorious traitor was by my reckoning the loudest man-made sound history has ever heard. And then the shouts, delighted or derisive, in surprise or in horror, as the condemned bounces and jerks and spins, before suffocating to death – it was all enough to make you eye your fellow man warily for days after, knowing him to be vulnerable to that kind of emotion.
All in good fun, you may ask? Judge me not: I do not condemn the condemned, I only write about them. And I once liked my work.
What had become of the execution ritual since those first ten years of mine, while it shared the superficialities of crowds, shouts, commerce, and executions with earlier revels, was not enjoyable. For the Alderman had spent those ten years, when they weren’t hanging traitors, decreeing crime after crime involving property. Correspondingly, there was lately a surge of crimes involving things rather than principles – acts criminalized now that but a dozen years ago were not. Corresponding to that, some years hence – especially the last two years – the inception of a new kind of criminal, his crime depriving others of things,
Lawmaking can tether public morality to it and drag it from one place to another, much as we might wish it were the other way round. Literate London was becoming as hungry for Accounts of petty criminals as for traitors, slowly, but surely. That was good for my purse. But hanging crimes – once exclusively in the sphere of treason, heresy, murder, highway robbery – were now the likes of horse-thievery and pick-pocketing. Behavior that should be deterred, but by death?