11th Century… Hang’d, Drawn, and Quartered! “Spectacular Justice” during the Medieval and Early Modern Period 31 Aug 20173 May 2018 Katherine Royer’s new book, The English Execution Narrative, 1200-1700 (2015) analyses the meanings behind the often gruesome executions carried out in the medieval and early modern period. Reviewed by Stephen…
18th century… Victor Hugo’s “The Last Day of a Condemned Man” (1829) 7 Jul 2017 Last week Google celebrated the life of Victor Hugo (1802-85) with some quirky illustrations on its masthead, so I thought I would do the same by writing a post on…
18th century… ‘The Prince of Pick-Pockets’: George Barrington (1755-1804) 12 May 201712 May 2017 George Waldron, alias Barrington, was born into a poor family at Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. Although destitute, his mother and father made sure to learn that he could read and…
18th century… John Terry (d.1803): A Yorkshire Murderer 29 Apr 201729 Apr 2017 All too often histories of crime focus upon what happened in the big cities such as London, Manchester, and New York. Part of the reason for this is that, as…
18th century… Unruly Apprentices 9 Apr 20179 Apr 2017 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many criminals recorded in works such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714), and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734), as…
Abbotsford… Law, Crime, and Friendship: Sir Walter Scott and Thomas ‘Tam’ Purdie 2 Apr 20172 Apr 2017 I have just returned from a conference entitled ‘Reworking Walter Scott’, held at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where I gave a paper on ‘The Chartist Robin Hood’ (a…
