London: The Executioner's City

Tyburn Fields is the best known site of execution in London, but London may be aptly named the executioner's city, so many were the places where executions could and did occur. "London - The Executioner's City" reveals the capital as a place where the bodies of criminals defined the boundaries of the city and heads on poles greeted patrons on London Bridge. The ubiquity of crime and punishment was taken for granted by countless generations of the capital's inhabitants, though it seems to have done little to stem the tide of criminality that has always threatened to engulf the city. The book is a powerful evocation of the dark side of London's history, where the great and not so good, the poor and helpless, the cruel and the idealistic crowd together to be punished in public. A King and more than one Queen, heretics, archbishops, pirates, poisoners, plotters, murderers and a cook executed for selling putrid fish met death by hanging, beheading, burning or boiling in London, and on most occasions the crowd roared its approval. David Brandon and Alan Brooke's book is a vivid picture of capital punishment in a capital that seems to have thrived on executions.