Matthew Beaumont

Matthew Beaumont teaches at UCL. He is writing a history of nightwalking.

Short Cuts: The route to Tyburn Tree

Matthew Beaumont, 20 June 2013

At midnight on the eve of a hanging day or ‘hanging fair’, usually a Monday, the bellman of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate recited these verses to the men and women due to be executed:

All you that in the condemn’d Holds do lie, Prepare you, for to Morrow you shall die.

The next morning, between nine and ten, a procession left the prison, to the sound of church bells, first...

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