Free Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain by Simon Webb

executions in those days? In fact, this is not at all what is being talked of here. Holinshed is referring to yet another unique custom associated with capital punishment in Halifax; no criminal could be executed unless he had confessed his crime and acknowledged that the sentence was just. In the late eighteenth century, a writer in Halifax confirmed that this had been the case, saying:

     
If upon examination they do find that the said felon is not only guilty of the goods stolen, and lying, or being in their view, but also do find the value of the goods stolen, to be of thirteen pence halfpenny or above, then is the felon found guilty by the said jury; grounding that their verdict upon the evidence of the goods stolen and lying before them, together with his own confession, which, in such cases, is always required; and being so found guilty, is by them condemned to be beheaded, according to ancient custom.

     
    One is at a loss to know why the accused should confess to the crime, knowing that failure to do so would save him from having his head chopped off! It is hard to avoid the suspicion that a certain amount of persuasion, possibly in the form of torture, must have been applied in order to deliver the required outcome. It has been suggested that the fear of perjuring oneself, in those days, would have been greater than the terror of being beheaded. Telling lies under an oath sworn to God would, at least in theory, have been enough to place one’s immortal soul in jeopardy, and this could perhaps have made an honest confession more likely. An explanation for this strange situation is that the requirement for confession to precede execution was only applicable in cases where the thief had not been directly apprehended in the act of stealing. Since there were no detectives in those days, this was probably the only category of criminal convicted. If they were not caught red-handed, then they probably got away with it.
    It is possible that Holinshed is mistaken about the law relating to any goods over the value of 13 d . The probability is that these executions were restricted either to the theft of cloth or livestock. Writing less than a century after the last execution by the Halifax Gibbet, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe , wrote that:

     
I must not quit Halifax till I give you some account of the famous course of justice anciently executed here, to prevent the stealing of cloth. Modern accounts pretend to say it was for all sorts of felonies, but I am well assured it was first erected purely, or at least principally, for such thieves as were apprehended stealing cloth from the tenters; and it seems very reasonable to think it was so, because of the conditions of the trial.

     
    The mention of ‘tenters’ requires a little explanation. Tenters are frames on which material or cloth, which has recently been woven, is hung. When the textiles trade first came to be established in this part of Yorkshire, it was important that those carrying out the work could simply leave the tenters out with the material on them. Any interference with the apparatus of the textile industry touched upon the prosperity of the whole town, and that is why the penalties were so severe.
    We know other things about the gibbet, things which are not mentioned in old writings. For instance, we know that it stood on a stone platform which was 4ft high and about 12ft long. How do we know this? Simply because the platform is still there. After the last beheading, undertaken by the Halifax Gibbet in 1650, the machine itself was dismantled and put into storage. The blade has survived and may be seen today in the Bankfield Museum, in Boothtown, Halifax. The platform upon which it stood was neglected and overgrown, eventually becoming a rubbish dump, whose local name, Gibbet Hill, gave a clue as to its origins. When the site was being cleared, before a warehouse was built there in June 1839, the original stone platform was uncovered, hidden