Free Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree by Alan Brooke Page A

alibi for a complex series of deceits involving the mysterious death of Lady Powell. Joan refused to be involved but found herself arrested anyway. Her house was searched and despite any very convincing evidence, she was charged with using witchcraft to kill Lady Powell. Joan vehemently denied the charges and declared that she had never even met the murdered woman. At her trial Joan was searched and, predictably, was found to have a ‘teat … in her secret parts’ (Ewan 1929: 274). It seems that the trial was rigged because defence witnesses failed to appear, possibly because of intimidation, while prosecution witnesses may have been bribed to testify against her. Joan vigorously protested her innocence even when she was offered a pardon if she confessed. In fact, her response to this offer was perhaps not the best one in the circumstances – she hit an officer of the law and made his nose bleed. The Ordinary or chaplain who travelled with Joan to Tyburn was so unrelenting in his attempts to make her confess that even the executioner asked him to desist.
    Anti-Catholic rhetoric was a feature of English society after the death of Mary in 1558. It was frequently presented in a way which tried to make Catholicism synonymous with criminality and also, more loosely, it was often used to demonise women and others who could be regarded as threats to authority and order. The pursuit of so-called ‘witches’, some of whom died at Tyburn, involved both Protestants and Catholics and was a part of this process. It was a response, frequently violent, by those in power to prevent social, economic and political changes which they thought were undermining and threatening the status quo. They were absolutely right because processes were evolving which over a period of two or more centuries would make Britain the crucible of a new order, an urbanised and industrial society. However, most of those who died at Tyburn in this period, both female and male, did not analyse or attempt to explain the circumstances in which they found themselves. They were unwitting victims in a process of historical change.
    The majority of those executed in the period under review were not religious offenders but nameless felons. For example, Machyn records in his diary that in 1556 ten thieves were hanged for robbery, sixteen felons were hanged in 1590 and nineteen in 1598. He mentions also in 1598 that a hangman with a ‘stump-lege’ was executed for theft and it was noted with some glee that he had ‘hangyd many a man and quartered many and beheaded many a noble man and other’ (Nichols 1848: 109). There is brief mention of other felons such as Thomas Green, a goldsmith, executed in 1576 for clipping and coining and in 1598 of Richard Ainger who was executed for the murder of his father at Grays Inn. The body was found floating in the Thames and Ainger, after being placed in manacles and tortured, was hanged at Tyburn.
    Many felons were found guilty of coining and clipping and appeared at the ‘Triple Tree’. The shortage of coin by the late fourteenth century led to widespread clipping and counterfeiting which became particularly prevalent in the early modern period. Laws against coining were harsh and it was considered serious enough to be a treasonable offence. In 1540 four felons died at Tyburn for clipping gold coins, two men were executed in 1554 for the ‘coining of naughty money’ and three more in July 1555. Other coiners are recorded as dying at Tyburn in 1572, 1576 and 1586. The anonymity of these offenders suggests that their crimes and their characters made no great impact at the time.

FOUR
Religion, Civil War and Restoration: Tyburn in the Seventeenth Century
    D uring the reign of the Stuarts between 1603 and 1714, London’s built-up area was expanding westwards, particularly into the neighbourhoods of Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Mayfair, and advancing steadily and apparently inexorably towards Tyburn which, however, remained a