That leads us nicely onto the beliefs surrounding the curative properties of the physical materials of the gallows.
The Hanged Man in a Piedmontese Tarot deck, by F. A woman even bared her breasts at Meister in 1799, so convinced was she in the curative properties of a hanged man’s hands. Gatrell notes that “a dozen people stroked themselves with a hanged man’s hands to cure themselves of wens” at the Newgate gallows in 1786. According to the folk remedy, rubbing the dead man’s hand across a swelling would ease the condition. Sufferers attended public executions, paying the hangman for access to the corpse. The hand of an executed man was believed to be a medicinal cure for a whole range of ailments. Yet it wasn’t just body-snatchers or magicians seeking the body parts of hanged men. After all, the hand of a hanged man was the main ingredient to the burglar’s favourite infiltration device. Perhaps its association with horror stories comes from two other nefarious practices body-snatching and the Hand of Glory. So the gallows already gives us phrases we use on a regular basis – neither of which immediately conjure up images of hanging. A hanging outside Newgate Prison A source of body parts They ‘got back on the wagon’ and went off to die having presumably never drank again. The wagon paused outside a pub in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road to allow the condemned prisoner one final drink. The latter refers to the long journey from Newgate Prison in London (the site is now occupied by the Old Bailey) to the gallows at Tyburn (also known as Tyburn Tree). Friends and family would crowd around the scaffold, pulling the legs of their loved one to hasten their demise. But the old ‘short drop’ method slowly strangled its victims. This more ‘humane’ method killed its victims by dislocating their neck, causing death more quickly. The former refers to a particularly tortuous experience before the so-called ‘long drop’ method of hanging was introduced in 1872. They give us a range of common phrases, such as ‘gallows humour’, while both ‘pulling one’s leg’ and ‘falling off the wagon’ come from the scaffold. The gallows loom large in the history of crime and punishment, particularly in England. But is there more to the gallows? Does their appearance mark them as simple set dressing, or are they the site of their own folklore? Let’s delve into the mysteries of the gallows… A body dangles from the scaffold while a hunched figure scurries around its base, wreathed in shadows and ground mist. The gallows are perhaps more associated with the creepy opening shots of horror films.
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