The Hanging Tree
The Pledge and the shadow of the gibbet
The tall oak gibbet stands high on the downs, its grisly cargo swaying in a bitter wind. A passing pedlar stops to rest against the sturdy wooden structure, paying little attention to the decaying corpse above – the sight has become familiar enough. So opens Digby Rumsey’s short film The Pledge, an earthy piece of Gothic cinema that was paired, somewhat bizarrely, with the frat boy escapades of Porky’s in 1981 theatres. It is a deeply atmospheric film, and one where the landscape plays a central role.
Rumsey based his film on ‘The Highwayman’, a short story by the pioneer of fantasy fiction, Lord Dunsany. More grounded than some of Dunsany’s other work, the tale tells of three criminals who must cut down and bury the gibbeted body of their friend, the highwayman Tom o’ the Roads. Dunsany paints a bleak picture of the opening scene:
For Tom tonight had nought but the wind to ride; they had taken his true black horse on the day when they took from him the green fields and the sky, men’s voices and the laughter of women, and had left him alone with chains about his neck to swing in the wind for ever. And the wind blew and blew.
Much of the story’s power comes from the moral ambiguities at play – in Dunsany’s tale, and especially in Rumsey’s film, Tom and his three companions are corrupt individuals capable of the most nefarious deeds. And yet, for all their sins, they are bound by a loyalty born of humanity: “a kindly jest and a few merry words, had grown into the triple friendship that would not desert his bones.”
For centuries in Britain, executed bodies, or body parts, were sometimes placed on display for deterrent effect. However, the 1752 Murder Act allowed judges to explicitly order gibbeting (or “hanging in chains”) as part of the death sentence itself, and, as a highwayman, we might imagine that this is what happened to Tom o’ the Roads. The practice was relatively rare, at least compared to executions[i] – Sarah Tarlow has shown that between 1752 and 1826 in England and Wales 219 people were hung in chains as a post-mortem punishment. Novelty certainly intensified public interest in the gibbet. In his seminal study of execution in England, The Hanging Tree, Vic Gatrell notes that “London was said to have been a deserted city on the Sunday following Lewis Avershaw’s gibbeting on Wimbledon Common in 1795; for several months his decomposing body provided a favourite Sunday outing.”
Much like Tom’s gang, friends and family would sometimes try to retrieve gibbeted bodies for burial, so especially high posts and padlocked cages were not uncommon. The remains of Tom Otter were suspended from a thirty-foot high pole on Saxilby Moor, Lincolnshire for over forty years until a savage storm brought the gibbet cage crashing down in 1850. Otter had been found guilty of murdering his pregnant wife, Mary Kirkham, on their wedding day with a hedge stake. While demanding punishment for such horrific crimes, some, such as the diarist Samuel Pepys, had always expressed revulsion at hanging in chains. However, it remained a public spectacle until the last two men were gibbeted in England in 1832.
Shot in the Cambrian Mountains of Central Wales, The Pledge lingers on both Tom’s decomposing body and the impact of the gibbet in the landscape. Several corpses were made by designer Alison Nalder for the film, each displaying a further stage of decay (the crew recall having to conceal these gruesome creations from the formidable landlady of their Welsh guesthouse). However, as Tom is reduced to little more than bones, the landscape, against which the corpse is usually contrasted, appears eternal – the hills watch on, aloof, yet imbibing the narratives that play out upon their stage. When there is interaction between the executed man and his environment, it is charged with symbolism. In Dunsany’s tale, in order to purify Tom’s soul, his “sneers”, “scoffs”, “bad lusts” and “stains of deeds that were evil” fall to the ground and grow in clusters, which Rumsey portrays as a fairy-ring-like display of mushrooms.
For all its striking presence as an intended deterrent, even more voices were ranged against gibbeting by the early nineteenth century. When calling for its abolition in parliament in 1834, Lord Suffield stated that he “was at a loss to find any reason for continuing such a practice, the only effect of which was that of scaring children and brutalising the minds of the people. It could produce no good moral effect whatever.” For all of this, of course, hanging itself remained, but in 1868 was taken inside, with the last executions taking place behind prison doors in August 1964. In the nineteenth century accounts, it is hard to shake the feeling that for many of the great and the good it was the spectacle and disturbance of the gibbet that was being objected to, rather than its inhumanity.
Isolated, rural gibbets do still stand. Even in their replica forms, the likes of Combe Gibbet in Berkshire, or Winter’s Gibbet in Northumberland, have a particular power to summon thoughts of those who, like Tom o’ the Roads, had their sentence extended beyond death. Elsewhere, place names recall punishments carried out in the past – Gallows Hill, Gibbet Wood, Tom Otter’s Bridge. In the conclusion to her book on the gibbet in Britain, Sarah Tarlow states that gibbeting “transforms the criminal into his own memorial and a mnemonic of his crime.” Echoes of these human stories remain, reverberating in the landscape, swaying in a bitter wind.
Further reading:
V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Sarah Tarlow, The Golden and Ghoulish Age of the Gibbet in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
[i] Gatrell estimates around 7,000 executions for England and Wales between 1770 and 1830.
