Hanging Alive in Chains: <i>Notes and Queries</i> , the <i>Western Antiquary</i> , and a Dark Victorian Fascination

Abstract In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a fascination with historical forms of punishment developed in Great Britain. As part of this, dozens of contributors participated in a debate in the weekly journal Notes and Queries, regarding whether ‘live gibbeting’ or ‘hanging alive in chains’ had ever been carried out as a punishment on British soil. While some readers argued that such a barbarous punishment would never have been tolerated, others searched assiduously through historical and legal documents for evidence, and yet others sent in local tales by way of proof. Suggestions about when the practice had been used varied from the reign of Henry VIII to the decades preceding Victoria’s coronation. By 1900, the uncertainty about live gibbeting had not been resolved and the question was revisited in the journal in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the 1870s and 1880s, the debate was picked up in a number of provincial newspapers. This paper analyses this macabre Victorian fascination, revealing the historical events and cultural changes that fed into its development, and discussing what it reveals about national identity and beliefs about historical progress. As well as analysing the long-running debate in Notes and Queries, the paper examines the Plymouth-based Western Antiquary newspaper column, as a regional case study of how curiosity about live gibbeting played out around one location – and how that discussion continued to reverberate in the early twenty-first century.