In The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons, Peter Linebaugh puts forward an alternative viewpoint on the issue of public hangings in eighteenth-century England: specifically, that death by hanging was not, as other historians have put forward, viewed with callousness and fear by the working class. Rather, he portrays the “Mob” as engaged in a struggle for the peace of the living and the preserved decency of, and respect for, the dead. In doing this, he not only takes issue with what he sees as a traditional and generalised line of historical knowledge, but also highlights what can be interpreted as timeless and universal human values.
The author's attempts to portray an alternative viewpoint are immediately apparent. Opening his account with a dramatic quotation describing one of the King's justices reading out a court verdict to a near-spiritless prisoner, Linebaugh provides us with a view of the contemporary legal system's aims - namely, to inspire “terror, majesty, dread and some pity” in the hearts of the local population. He instantly attacks this account, however, claiming instead that there was a prevailing atmosphere of “irreverence, humour and defiance.” Linebaugh's justification for such a claim is primarily linguistic in nature; he goes on to list a host of humorous words related to hanging. The phrases “to cry cockles”, “to be…frummagemmed”, and “to ride a horse foaled by an acorn” each serve to colourfully illustrate a more defiant and less serious public conception of the noose. This claim exhibits an element of inconsistency, however, when compared with what the author explicitly points out in his penultimate paragraph: that these offenders' deaths are, in fact, shown as anything but unimportant to society. Linebaugh points out that the common social demographic of those hanged is that of a young, fertile worker and family member. Thus, he labels a death through hanging as a “sentimental loss” as well as one of “deep moral and material consequence”. He even chooses to use the phrase “death crisis” to describe the consequences of a hanging. Linebaugh makes it clear, therefore, that death by hanging was not viewed with indifference.
Despite the inconsistency that can be found between Linebaugh's two accounts of humour and seriousness, it is clear that in both cases he seeks to challenge the established viewpoints of terror and callousness. He continues to challenge the notion of callous indifference throughout the account, citing evidence for what he sees as an air of intense decency and respect at the gallows. The fact that hangings were “treated as a type of wedding” serves to emphasise the prevalence of this atmosphere. Condemned prisoners went to their deaths wearing their finest clothes, as is found in the case of John Raymond, who wrote his relatives asking for “some white clothes to appear in on the morning he was to suffer”, or George Anderson, who was hanged in breeches with black ferret trimmings. These men were clearly not spiritless, as the King's justice's words on the opening page would suggest. On the contrary, Linebaugh argues, dignity was kept to the very end.
Respect, so inextricably bound up with decency and dignity, is also found with no shortage at the Tyburn gallows. It came, as Linebaugh puts forward, in many forms. One such form of respect can be illustrated by the “need for proper treatment of the dead” arising from the labouring class's superstitions directed towards the dead, fearing they might rise again “to haunt” them. This was as likely to have stemmed from religious beliefs as from actual resurrections, in which an incomplete hanging would give rise to the victim's revival. Belief in the healing power of the corpse is further evidence for another form of respect held for the dead. It was thought that if a child was stroked by the hand of an executed criminal, he or she would be guaranteed good health, and that the same hand could cure ulcers, cancerous growths, bleeding tumours, and even a woman's infertility. This type of action, Linebaugh writes, “honours the power of the felon's corpse”. In this sense, he interprets these practises and beliefs, labelled in our time as “bad taste” and superstition, instead as pain-relieving techniques for the peace of the living and methods for laying the dead to a respectful rest. In fact, he explicitly relates superstition to respect, calling the crowd's actions a “respectful treatment” of the dead.
This respect for the dead found widespread in the Mob is not, however, borne out in Linebaugh's descriptions of the medical surgeons and legal practitioners of the time. The former concerned only with furthering medical research and the latter with “aggravating capital punishment”, it is clear to Linebaugh that only the lower class crowd was concerned with the proper treatment of the convicted. This quasi-symbiotic relationship between surgeons, who “humiliat[ed]” the dead, and lawmakers, who relied on this humiliation to worsen their sentences, became “a main cause” of the riots and disturbances witnessed at Tyburn. The wide scale of these anti-surgeon and anti-authority riots can be seen as strong additional evidence for the common respect held for the dead.
