The first documented execution at Tyburn was on 6 April 1196: William Fitz Osbert, a London demagogue who had led a recent civic uprising against the burgesses and was caught trying to claim sanctuary at St Mary-le-Bow before being dragged out by the king’s officers. He was hanged on a tree at a small triangle of waste ground at the western edge of medieval London, where a Roman road from the City passed a stream called the Tyburn (the now-buried tributary of the Thames that gave the area its name). The body was left displayed for several days as a public warning. The administrative-civic point of the choice of location was that it was directly outside the City of London’s jurisdiction — at the western boundary of the liberties of the City — so that the execution was conducted by the Crown rather than by the City authorities.
The site became the main public execution venue of the English crown for the next 587 years. The last execution at Tyburn was on 3 November 1783: a highwayman named John Austin, hanged for armed robbery on the Bedfont road. The substantial change in penal-administrative policy that had been working through London government for the previous several decades took effect within weeks, and the principal execution site moved from Tyburn to Newgate Prison in the City itself. The Tyburn gallows were dismantled. The site sat as undeveloped waste ground for several decades and was eventually paved over.
The Marble Arch — the substantial neoclassical triumphal arch designed by John Nash for the front entrance of Buckingham Palace in 1827 and moved to its current location at the western end of Oxford Street in 1851 — sits approximately on the site of the original gallows. A small plaque embedded in the central traffic island of the modern road junction marks the spot. Most of the millions of tourists who pass through Marble Arch every year do not notice it.
What the gallows were
The Tyburn gallows of the medieval and early-modern periods were not the simple single-beam village gibbet of popular imagination. The substantial Tyburn structure documented from the late 16th century forward — the so-called Triple Tree — was a permanent wooden structure consisting of three vertical posts about 5.5 metres tall arranged in an equilateral triangle, with three horizontal crossbeams joining their tops, capable of executing up to 24 condemned at once (eight per crossbeam). The structure stood permanently in the open at Tyburn from approximately 1571 until 1759, when it was replaced by a portable scaffold that could be assembled on the day of an execution and removed afterward.
The standard procedure for a Tyburn hanging was a public-ceremonial event. Condemned prisoners were carried from Newgate Prison in central London on an open horse-drawn cart, processing west through the streets of the City along an approximately 4-kilometre route that became known as the Tyburn Way (now substantially Oxford Street). The route was lined with crowds — sometimes tens of thousands strong; the largest documented hanging crowds approached 100,000 — who would jeer the condemned, throw objects, and (depending on the popular reputation of the specific prisoner) sometimes attempt to rescue them en route. The procession typically took several hours. At Tyburn the prisoners were hanged from the cart’s tailboard — the cart was driven forward and the condemned were left dangling — and the bodies were left for approximately an hour before being cut down and either claimed by family or taken away by the surgeons of the Royal College of Physicians for anatomical dissection.
The hanging itself was not the quick-drop neck-breaking technique introduced in the late 19th century. The Tyburn method was strangulation by suspension; death typically took between five and twenty minutes. The body of medical writing on the physiology of judicial hanging — what would happen if the rope broke, what the various stages of strangulation visible to the crowd represented, the question of whether revival after fifteen minutes’ suspension was possible (it sometimes was, with documented Tyburn cases) — was substantially developed by 18th-century London surgeons studying their own dissection-room material.
The numbers
Conservative modern estimates place the total number of executions at Tyburn between 1196 and 1783 at approximately 60,000-80,000. The frequency was not constant. The medieval rate was approximately 20-50 hangings per year. The Tudor rate was substantially higher (approximately 200-300 hangings per year at the worst points, particularly during the wave of post-Reformation political-religious executions of the 1530s and 1550s). The 18th-century rate ran at approximately 200-400 hangings per year at the worst points (during the various 18th-century moral-panic waves about urban crime).
The majority of Tyburn victims were ordinary criminals convicted of property crimes — theft, burglary, highway robbery — that were capital offenses under the extraordinarily broad capital-crime list of the English Bloody Code of the 18th century (approximately 220 separate capital offenses by 1815, ranging from murder down to theft of property worth more than 12 pence). The political-religious executions — which historically attract most of the documentation — were a small minority of the total volume.
The famous ones
A small selection of the specifically-documented Tyburn executions:
Roger Mortimer (29 November 1330) — the first nobleman hanged at Tyburn, by Edward III’s specific order, naked and on the common gallows, as a deliberate humiliation. Mortimer had previously run England as the de facto regent during the underage years of Edward III’s reign with the king’s mother Isabella of France.
Perkin Warbeck (23 November 1499) — the Yorkist pretender who had nearly overthrown Henry VII in the 1490s.
Sir Thomas More (formerly Lord Chancellor; not at Tyburn — More was beheaded at Tower Hill, the more honourable site reserved for senior aristocrats — but Tyburn took the Catholic priests and the smaller-fry recusants associated with the same Henrician religious crisis).
Mary, Queen of Scots’ Catholic conspirator Anthony Babington (20 September 1586) — hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the more elaborate variation of capital punishment reserved for treason. The procedure involved hanging the condemned to the point of unconsciousness, cutting him down still alive, then disembowelling and dismembering him before death.
Jack Sheppard (16 November 1724) — the celebrity 18th-century thief whose successive escapes from Newgate Prison had been the subject of a sustained popular-press serial; his execution drew a crowd estimated at 200,000.
The Methodist preacher John Wesley preached against the Tyburn executions repeatedly in the mid-18th century, citing them as a argument against the moral coarsening produced by public spectacle. His campaign and similar arguments by other reformers contributed substantially to the 1783 decision to move executions to Newgate.
The cultural inheritance
The Tyburn site does not significantly survive in modern London consciousness. The single most prominent visible reminder is the Catholic Tyburn Convent at 8 Hyde Park Place, opened in 1903 on the south side of the modern road junction. The convent was founded by Mother Adèle Garnier as a memorial to the approximately 105 Catholic martyrs executed at Tyburn during the various post-Reformation religious crises (1535-1681); the convent’s small chapel contains relics of several of the martyrs and a collection of paintings depicting Tyburn executions.
The phrase Tyburn fair — used in 18th-century popular speech for any chaotic public event — survives in modern English only in historical scholarly usage. The portion of the modern English vocabulary connected to public execution — gallows humour, swinging, dancing on air, the long drop, cutting one’s own throat, making a pretty corpse — was substantially shaped by the 600-year Tyburn tradition. The English have been substantially indifferent to executions since approximately 1868 (when the last public execution in England was held outside Newgate); the language has survived the institutional practice by approximately 160 years and counting.