Word Of The Day Challenge:  Hang Out

Did you know that in Georgian,  England when a condemned prisoner was sentenced to be executed his ( or her ) body was could be hung out to rot in a gibbet as a warning to other people that they needed to re-think breaking laws.

Were you also aware that the condemned prisoner was alive when the gibbet was especially  designed for them?

Gibbets weren’t re-purposed due to the fact that bodies were left in them to rot, and that the life expectancy on ‘death row’ was a a matter of weeks and not years the way it is now. So there wasn’t exactly a stash of these devices on hand. Plus, for them to be effective they really did need to be custom fitted.

For example, in one case a gibbet was used as a coffin with a few bones still inside of it. It not like it was reusable and it was probably require cleaning  so someone just dug a hold and shoved it in. Executed prisoners were denied burials in churchyards and most of them ended up buried ( gibbet or nooses ) in prison yards.

One thing I learned was that creating a Gibbet wasn’t an exact science.  Sometimes the measurements were off because the jobs were rushed and the person who’s remains would be housed in the Gibbet weren’t in the mood to stand still for their final fitting. It must have been horrific to stand there to be fitted for a cage  that would be hung from a post where nature would treat your remains with all the brutality it usually works on a corpse in private.

Gibbeting was a post mortem punishment, and I’m pretty sure the thought of what would happen to their remains after they were executed and what they would look like and how they would be viewed and treated was the stuff of nightmares- and I’m sure that was the idea.

William Winter and two of his female accomplices ( sisters-Jane and Eleanor Clark ) murdered an elderly shopkeeper who they believed had money hidden in her home. They slashed her throat and then they robbed her.

All three were caught and sentenced to hang.

The sisters remains were given over local physicians for anatomical dissection because women’s bodies were in high demand for dissection.

It must have been horrifying to hear that not only were you going to be hung, but your body would be dissected by medical students and once the classes were over, the hacked-up pieces were swept up like trash. Archaeological digs show that the eventual burials at medical schools often involved non-matching combinations of limbs and torsos from completely different people thrown together into cheap, communal boxes.

Winter may have been executed, but his punishment was intended to go on after his death.

I have read that Winter’s body was never meant to be buried. Instead, it was left there as a festering warning to travelers and would-be criminals. I can’t see that warning  working- after all people used to take picnics to executions  At any rate, Winter’s corpse hung on the moors for several years until his clothes and flesh completely rotted away.  As his skeleton began to fall apart, the story goes  locals gathered the bones, packed them into a tarred sack, and hung them right back up on the hook

I think if anything, the sight of Winter’s rotting corpse probably kept strangers from stopping in  on Elsdon at all.  Which may have been the idea.

( Below ) Winter’s Gibbet is a 19th century replica of the gallows from which William Winter was hung for the murder of Margaret Crozier in 1791. It is located about 2 miles south-east of Elsdon in Northumberland by Steng Cross. Winter’s rotting corpse hung here for many years close to the location of the murder. Steng Cross here, was a medieval roadside cross, at the highest point on the old drover’s road from Elsdon. Just along the road was the old smithy where the cattle were shod for their long journey to the market. The gibbet and surviving base of the medieval cross are Grade II listed on the National Heritage List for England.

In 1791 there lived here an old woman named Margaret Crozier, who kept a small shop for the of drapery and other goods. Believing her to be rich, one William Winter, a desperate character, but recently returned from transportation, at the instigation, and with the assistance of two female faws (vendors of crockery and tinwork) named Jane and Eleanor Clark, who in their wanderings had experienced the kindness of Margaret Crozier, broke into the lonely Pele on the night of 29th August 1791, and cruelly murdered the poor old woman, loading the ass they had brought with her goods. The day before they had rested and dined in a sheep fold on Whisker-shield Common, which overlooked the Raw, and it was from a description given of them by a shepherd boy, who had seen them and taken particular notice of the number and character of the nails in Winter’s shoes, and also the peculiar gully, or butcher’s knife with which he divided the food that brought them to justice.

The road where William Winter is said to be haunted by his ghost. But if you ask me, if the ghost of William Winter ever clapped his eyes on his rotting corpse that stretch of road is the last place he would haunt.