Probably the most common form of execution and the first one that people think about in regard to Medieval executions, hanging was the usual method of capital punishment for the Anglo Saxons. Other means of execution have been implemented but none of them has been so common and used for so many centuries in Europe, as death by hangman.

Why did they hang people in medieval times?

Torture was typically used as a way to extract evidence and information and public execution was often used as a warning to prevent others from committing crimes. There were no laws or rights given to prisoners, allowing torture and executions to be widespread and completely unregulated.

A gibbet is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executioner's block, impalement stake, hanging gallows, or related scaffold). Gibbeting is the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. Occasionally, the gibbet was also used as a method of execution, with the criminal being left to die of exposure, thirst and/or starvation. The practice of placing a criminal on display within a gibbet is also called "hanging in chains".

Hanging in Chains as a Punishment

Historically, the displaying of the criminal corpse was used as the final part of either an aggravated execution or a post-mortem punishment in the most atrocious criminal cases. In Scotland, prior to the mid-eighteenth century, it was used for heinous murders.

Hugo Arnot cited the 1601 case of Thomas Armstrong, tried for the murder of Sir John Carmichael, the warden of the west marches, as the first instance in Scotland of a malefactor hung in chains. Lord MacLaurin also highlighted the case of John Dow Macgregor, hung in chains in 1637 for theft, robbery and slaughter. Chapter 5 argued that executions causing prolonged pre-mortem suffering were waning by the mid-eighteenth century. Instead, in murder cases, the condemned were to be executed more swiftly but their bodies subject to post-mortem punishment.

While there was no single belief system regarding how far post-mortem punishments affected the dead body or the fate of the soul, there is evidence of concerns, in this chapter and others, regarding the disposal of criminal corpses. The hanging of an offender’s body in chains potentially had a multiplicity of impact, as it not only denied the corpse a burial but also placed the body in full public view to gradually rot.

If a criminal was to be hung in chains, the body would be cut down from the scaffold after hanging for the usual time of between 30 and 60 minutes so that it could be hung up again inside the gibbet cage. The words gallows and gibbet have often been used interchangeably to describe the apparatus on which the criminal was to be executed. However, this study refers to the gallows as the apparatus from which criminals were hanged by the neck during their execution, and the gibbet describes the structure used for the exposure of criminal corpses: an upright post with a projecting arm from which the cage would hang.

Tarlow has conducted an extensive search for surviving details of gibbets used in England in this period. She has demonstrated that gibbet cages were made for individual offenders as they were required. This appears to have also been the practice in Scotland as, in some cases, the bodies remained on display for several years making reuse impractical. In terms of the cost of gibbeting offenders, Tarlow demonstrated that it was potentially very expensive. For example, the execution and hanging in chains of Edward Miles in England in 1793 amounted to over £67.. The most detailed description of a Scottish gibbet found by the current study is the one used for Kenneth Leal in 1773.

His body was stolen and buried at the gibbet foot but was discovered in 1829 with the cage relatively intact. It consisted of a ring around each ankle, from which a chain passed up each leg fastened to a band of strong iron hooped around the body. Four straps passed from the hoop, up the body, to a ring at the neck. The neck ring was attached to the head cap by four straps passing on each side of the head to meet at the top.

The assembly was attached to a strongly riveted swivel-link which allowed the contraption to rotate. The cage was then suspended from a two-foot chain and all the metalwork was made of iron. Certainly, this was a visually impressive form of punishment intended to leave a marked impression upon those who encountered it.