The Places and Tools of Execution

Abstract

The materiality of gallows' sites and the apparatus of execution had their own magical and medical afterlife, inextricably linked with, yet ultimately independent of, the executed criminal. This chapter includes discussion on European gallows traditions, English legends of providential strangulation, and the trade in and lore of the gallows mandrake. It then focuses on the trade in hanging ropes in Europe and America, and the relationship between mementos and magical talismans. Keywords Gallows • Providence • Mandrake • Hanging rope • Talisman We move now from matters concerning the identity and potency of criminal bodies to their post-mortem relationship with the immediate physical environment where their last sentient moments were extinguished and witnessed. The materiality of gallows sites and the apparatus of execution have their own magical and medical afterlife, inextricably linked with, yet ultimately independent of, the executed criminal. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, execution sites across Western Europe were increasingly situated in fixed locations, with those sentenced for capital offences being condemned to die 'at the usual place'. There had always been a mix of urban and rural gallows, of course, but the process of state-building led to centralised control over