Free Olde London Punishments by David Brandon

rotting timbers combined with the packed bodies of the prisoners. In the tropics the heat was unbearable.
    Punishments on board varied from whipping, solitary confinement, shaving of heads (a punishment reserved mainly for female convicts), and placing in irons into a small black box for a number of days, to being put on bread and water. In 1832 John Clifton died of exhaustion after being ordered to walk with a bed on his back for two hours – a punishment for expressing his wish that the ship would catch fire. For attempted mutiny, execution was the most serious penalty, although many received a severe flogging. A list of offences that carried punishments was placed on the wall on the prison deck.
    Further torments included a range of ailments prisoners would suffer from. Diarrhoea was by far the most common, followed by constipation and haemorrhoids. Large iron buckets were used as toilets, but these could not be emptied and cleaned out during the night. Scurvy, which arises from a lack of vitamin C, became a problem and is mentioned in many of the journals, as did boils, rheumatism, colic and catarrh – convenient catch-all, ‘catarrh’. The presence of hordes of rats was an unavoidable hazard; typhus was a dreaded disease facilitated by rats and lice. Cholera was another epidemic disease caused by dirty water.

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    Places Of Execution
    Many Londoners were inured to images of death. Public executions, as well as the display of rotting bodies on gibbets and spiked heads on poles, were common sights. Attending an execution was a generally accepted practice, as the diarist Henry Machyn made clear in the mid-sixteenth century: he recorded that he attended two and sometimes three per day. In the space of one month in 1557, Machyn saw eight felons hanged at Tyburn, three men and two women burnt at Smithfield for heresy, and seven pirates hanged at Wapping. Like many Londoners, Machyn witnessed executions as part of the popular calendar ritual.
    Smithfield
    For over 400 years, Smithfield was one of London’s main sites of execution. Smithfield, just to the west of the City of London and close to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, is not to be confused with East Smithfield, which was close to the Tower of London and another execution place, albeit minor by comparison. Those whose lives ended at the former included William Wallace, the Scottish patriot, in 1305; many Lollards, religious dissidents of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; and numerous Protestant martyrs during the reign of Mary in the middle of the sixteenth century. Those who died for religious reasons were mostly burned as heretics and their sufferings usually attracted large numbers of appalled but fascinated spectators. These times were the heyday of Smithfield as a place of execution, but judicial deaths there continued sporadically into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
    The story of William Wallace (1272-1305) has taken on a particular significance in both historical and mythical terms. Conflicts with Scotland from the 1290s saw Wallace establish a reputation. In 1305 Wallace was captured near Glasgow and after a brief imprisonment in Dumbarton Castle he was taken to London to face a show trial in Westminster Hall where he was charged with treason, murder, robbery and ‘various other felonies’. The verdict of the court was that Wallace should be dragged from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London and from there through the City to Smithfield. On 23 August Wallace was wrapped in an ox hide and dragged by horses four miles through London to Smithfield where he was hanged as a murderer on a very high gallows made for the occasion. An expectant crowd looked on as he was cut down while still alive and then mutilated, disembowelled and, being convicted of treason, his ‘privy parts’ would have been removed. The ritual continued. As a punishment for the ‘great wickedness which he had practised towards God and His holy church by burning