The London Hanged

[Dave Monroe]

Linebaugh, Peter.  The London Hanged: Crime and
   Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.  2nd ed.
   London and New York: Verso, 2003 [1992].

"Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become
an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise
of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the
spectacle of a hanging served the purpose of forcing
the poor population of London to accept the
criminalization of customary rights and new forms of
private property."

http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/l-titles/linebaugh_p_london_hang.shtml

"In eighteenth-century London the gallows at Tyburn
was the dramatic focus of a struggle between the rich
and the poor. Most of the London hanged were executed
for property crimes, and the chief lesson that the
gallows had to teach was: 'Respect private property'.
The executions took place amid a London populace that
knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned.
Indeed, in this stimulating account Peter Linebaugh
shows how there was little distinction between a
'criminal' population and the poor population of
London as a whole. Necessity drove the city's poor
into inevitable conflict with the laws of a privileged
ruling class. Peter Linebaugh examines how the meaning
of 'property' changed substantially during a century
of unparalleled growth in trade and commerce, analyses
the increasing attempts of the propertied classes to
criminalize 'customary rights'--perquisites of
employment that the labouring poor depended upon for
survival--and suggests that property-owners, by their
exploitation of the emergent working class,
substantially determined the nature of crime, and that
crime, in turn, shaped the development of the economic
system. Peter Linebaugh's account not only pinpoints
critical themes in the formation of the working class,
but also presents the plight of the individuals who
made up that class. Contemporary documents of the
period are skilfully used to recreate the predicament
of men and women who, in the pursuit of a bare
subsistence, had good reason to fear the example of
Tyburn's 'triple tree.'"

http://www.semcoop.com/detail/1859846386

And see as well ...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=2755

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2575

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9909&msg=41275&sort=date

   "'You'd appreciate Wapping High Street, then,--
and, and Tyburn, of course! put that on your list.'
   "'Alluring out there, is it?'
   "Mason explains, though without his precise reason
for it, that, for the past Year or more, it has been
his practice to attend the Friday Hangings at 
that melancholy place [...] 'There's nothing like it,
it's London at its purest,' he cries, 'You must come
out there with me, soon as we may.'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p.
15)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59738&sort=date


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