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

reason to suppose that the Halifax Gibbet was not the only beheading machine operating in Yorkshire during the Middle Ages. It was certainly the last to be used, and has, perhaps, become famous because of this. The Halifax Gibbet was not used as frequently as the gallows were in other districts. The records show that between 1541 and 1650, only fifty-three people were executed by it in total. This averages out at one victim every two years. The final executions were both conducted on the same day in April 1650. These two men, John Wilkinson and Anthony Mitchell, both from Sowerby, had been convicted of theft. Between them, they had stolen sixteen yards of material belonging to Samuel Colbeck of Warley; the material being valued at 1 s a yard. They had also made off with two colts belonging to John Cusforth, who lived near Wakefield. Mitchell was also found guilty of stealing another piece of cloth.
    Why was the use of the Halifax Gibbet discontinued? It has been suggested that this might have been in reaction to the beheading of Charles I, the previous year. It is thought that the act of cutting off a king’s head made this type of execution generally unpopular. This is, however, only speculation. We do not know why such an apparently effective deterrent should have been so abruptly abandoned.
    As far as is known, the Halifax Gibbet was the first beheading machine ever devised, although there are rumours that something of the sort was being used in Ireland centuries earlier. The only information on this machine though, dates from the sixteenth century. A picture from that period exists, it is called, ‘The execution of Murcod Ballagh near to Merton in Ireland 1307’. This shows a machine almost identical in appearance to the Halifax Gibbet. Whether the artist simply copied a picture of the Halifax Gibbet, or whether this is an authentic and different device, is impossible to say now.
    That a decapitation machine existed before either the guillotine or the Halifax Gibbet is undeniable, and it is quite possible that both these later devices were based upon the Italian mannaia. Its first recorded use was on 29 October 1268, when it was used to remove the head of Conradin Hohenstaufen of Swabia. Writing much later, a Dominican priest called Jean-Baptist Labat describes the mannaia as it was operating in 1730. It had two uprights holding a blade which was 10in across, which weighed about 80lbs. This machine certainly inspired the guillotine, but whether an earlier version was the prototype for the Halifax Gibbet, or whether it was itself a copy of the English mechanism, is impossible to say.
    A device very similar to the Halifax Gibbet was certainly operating in Edinburgh from the sixteenth century onwards, but this was no more than a copy of the English machine. In 1563, James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, was appointed Lord Chancellor of Scotland and that same year he visited Yorkshire where, it is supposed, he saw the Halifax Gibbet in action. He was so impressed with the speed and ease with which criminals could be executed in this way, that when he returned to Scotland, he commissioned a copy of the Halifax Gibbet to be used in Edinburgh.
    The Scottish machine featured one important improvement, which was a hinged iron bar clamping the victim’s neck in place during the execution. There would be no question of any condemned man in Edinburgh jerking his head out of the way at the last moment! There is an old piece of folk etymology which suggests that the Scottish machine was christened the ‘maiden’ because it took a long time for it to see any action. This is not true, although it was two years before it was first used. In fact, ‘maiden’, in this sense, is a corruption of the Gaelic ‘modrun’, which is a term used for a place of judgement.
    One story suggests that the Earl of Morton had a model of the Halifax Gibbet made while he was visiting the north of England, and that those who built the maiden copied the