Word: tyburn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gallows and the gibbet were almost as commonplace as the village church, and "hanging days" were occasions for revelry. In London at the "Tyburn tree" (the present location of Marble Arch), crowds of 100,000 or more assembled to watch the festivities. Distinguished visitors to the ceremonies at Newgate prison were often invited to remain for breakfast. "And if there were no more than six or seven hanged," according to one chronicler, the guests "would return grumbling and disappointed ... After breakfast was over, the whole party adjourned to see the 'cutting down...
...quantitative terms, the 20th century seems more death-ridden than any other. Yet mass death is strangely impersonal; an 18th century hanging at Tyburn probably had more immediate impact on the watching crowd than the almost incomprehensible statistics of modern war and calculated terror have today. In the last century, Byron, Shelley, Keats and a whole generation of young poets haunted by romanticism and tuberculosis could be "half in love with easeful Death," wooing it as they would woo a woman. Even before World War I, German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke could still yearn for "the great death" for which...
...Polly Peachum, Polly's Parents bribe the gentleman robber's other bawds to turn him in for the reward. Mac's other love, Lucy Lockit, frees him, only to have him recaptured. And he would hang, were it not for every opera's prescribed happy ending. Macheath escapes from Tyburn and rejoins Polly in a fullthroated choral finale...
...excellent people to think of the future without them." As late as the mid-19th century, when an Englishman could be hanged for 200 different offenses, most of them trivial, 20 or more persons were dispatched at once, and vast festive crowds turned out for the "hanging days" at Tyburn. In recent years, a steady campaign against the death penalty has been fought by lawyers and authors, including Barrister Charles Duff, who dedicated his devastating, sardonic Handbook on Hanging to "The Hangmen of England and Similar Constitutional Bulwarks Everywhere...
Plagues riddled London. The severed heads of criminals rotted in the sun at Tyburn Tree. The acme of the hangman's art was to cut his man down and eviscerate him while still alive; a priest was once heard saying his prayers even as his heart palpitated in the hangman's palm. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel; "Kit" Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern" brawl. The Elizabethans lived dangerously, and while they lived, they were asmile with daring. Shakespeare held a magnifying glass to the spirit of his age, and set the unroofed...