The Death Penalty: When Was Capital Punishment Abolished in Britain?

The Death Penalty: When Was Capital Punishment Abolished in Britain?

For millennia, the British state could legally punish convicted criminals with the death penalty. Today, the threat of capital punishment in Britain feels distant, but it was only in 1964 that the last executions for capital crimes took place.

Throughout British history, capital punishment has been enforced in various ways, determined by shifts in society’s attitudes towards religion, gender, wealth and morality. Yet as negative attitudes towards state-sanctioned killing grew, the nature and number of death sentences wained, eventually leading to abolition in the mid 20th century.

Here’s the history of the death penalty in Britain and its eventual abolishment.

The ‘Long Drop’

From the time of the Anglo-Saxons until the 20th century, the most common form of capital punishment in Britain was hanging. The punishment initially involved putting a noose around the condemned neck and suspending them from a tree branch. Later, ladders and carts were employed to hang people from wooden gallows, who would die by asphyxiation.

By the 13th century, this sentence had evolved into being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’. This particularly grisly punishment was reserved for those who committed treason – a crime against your crown and countrymen.

It involved being ‘drawn’ or dragged to their place of execution, hanged until the near-point of death, before being disemboweled or ‘quartered’. As final penance for their crimes, the offender’s limbs or head were sometimes displayed publicly as a warning to other would-be criminals.

In the 18th century, the system of the ‘new drop’ or ‘long drop’ was devised. First used at London’s Newgate Prison in 1783, the new method involved gallows able to accommodate 2 or 3 guilty at a time.
Each of the condemned stood with a noose looped around their neck before a trapdoor was released, causing them to fall and break their necks. The quick death administered by the ‘long drop’ was seen as more humane than strangling.
Burning and beheading

Not all those found guilty were sentenced to hanging however. Burning at the stake was also a popular form of capital punishment in Britain and was used for those who committed heresy in the 11th century and treason from the 13th (although it was replaced by hanging in 1790).

During the reign of Mary I, a large number of religious dissidents were burnt at the stake. Mary reinstated Catholicism as the state religion when she became queen in 1553, and had some 220 Protestant opponents convicted of heresy and burnt at the stake, earning her the nickname ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor.

Burning was also a gendered sentence: women convicted of petty treason, killing their husband and therefore overturning the patriarchal order of state and society, were often burnt at the stake. Those accused of witchcraft, disproportionately women, were also sentenced to burning, continued in Scotland until the 18th century.

Nobles, however, could escape the excruciating fate of the flames. As a final mark of their status, the elite were often executed by beheading. Swift and considered the least painful of capital punishments, notable historical figures such as Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I were all condemned to lose their heads.