London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The 18th Century

In 18th century London the gallows at Tyburn was the dramatic focus of a struggle between the rich and the poor. Most of the London hanged were executed for property crimes, and the chief lesson that the gallows had to teach was "respect private property". The executions took place amid a London populace that knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned. Indeed, there was little distinction between a "criminal" population and the poor population as a whole, as necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the laws of the privileged ruling class. Peter Linebaugh provides an analysis of how the propertied classes, in the exploitation of the emergent working class, substantially determined the nature of crime, and how crime, in turn, shaped the development of the economic system. Contemporary documents of the period are used to recreate the predicament of men and women who, in the pursuit of bare subsistence, had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's "triple tree".