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This chapter begins by highlighting the fact that historians of crime and justice have largely ignored an important dimension of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century capital punishment system—the degree to which aggravated and post-execution sanctions played an important and growing role in penal policy, especially after the Murder Act of 1752. It then discusses the variety of different forms of post-execution punishment and (more occasionally) of aggravated execution practices that were used in England in the period leading up to the early-eighteenth century.

This chapter analyses the extensive debates about the introduction of either aggravated pre-execution policies or of the post-execution punishment of the criminal corpse that took place between the 1690s and 1752. It discusses the key forms of aggravated or post-execution punishment that were debated: breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, gibbeting (either dead or alive), dissection and (retaliatory punishment based on the injuries inflicted on the victim). After discussing three earlier key sub-periods when legislative change was seriously debated but not eventually adopted by Parliament, it focuses on the reasons behind the passing of the 1752 Act, which for the first time made dissection and hanging in chains a formal part of sentencing policy for murder. In doing so it argues that historians have underestimated the vital role played in that process by the authorities’ need to create differentiation within the capital punishment system so that minor offenders were no longer seen as suffering the same sentences as heinous murderers.

This chapter focuses not on attitudes and debates but on the actual sentencing decisions made by the courts. The primary focus is the period from 1752 to the 1830s and the use that the courts made of sentences involving post-execution punishments between the Murder Act and its repeal in the early 1830s. Having analysed the overall pattern, in which dissection always constituted at least three-quarters of post-execution punishments, change over time then becomes the focus, particular attention being given to the rapid decline of hanging in chains after 1802–1803 and the dominance of penal dissection 1802–1832. Significant geographical variations in post-execution policies are also identified, and a tentative exploration is made of the ways that the nature of the offence or of the offender may have influenced which post-execution punishment was inflicted. The reasons for the dominance of penal dissection—cost, controllability, inconvenience, crowd opposition to gibbeting and so on—are then analysed.

This chapter discusses changing attitudes to post-execution punishment between 1752 and the 1830s. It begins by analysing the ways the judges interpreted the 1752 Act and more importantly how the surgeons chose to develop their penal role. It then focusses on key periods of debate between the passing of the Murder Act and its repeal in 1832, particular attention being given to the later eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century debates about extending the use of post-execution punishments to include non-homicidal offences such as robbery and burglary. The gradual abandonment of post-execution punishment is then analysed. The ending of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the growing doubts about gibbeting and its effective abandonment at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the heated parliamentary debates about ending penal dissection that culminated in its abandonment in 1832. Defended to the last by the judges and by key government figures, who saw it as playing a vital differentiating role within the capital punishment system, penal dissection could only be ended because, by 1832, the whole ‘Bloody Code’ system was being rapidly dismantled.

This chapter begins by discussing why the Murder Act was passed and why its post-execution punishment regime stayed in place for 80 years, arguing that although it was not an effective deterrent, it was seen as an important part of the penal landscape, providing a means of differentiating between the punishment of murder and that of other capital crimes. It then discusses the key role the judges played in shaping capital punishment policy, and the importance of comparing post-execution punishments across different colonial, national and regional contexts, before going on to highlight the ways that the history of post-execution punishment challenges both the eighteenth-century reformers own key ‘civilizing’ narrative, and historians’ models of the chronology of penal change. The ending of burning at the stake in the 1790s and the collapse of hanging in chains in 1802–1803, along with other parallel changes in capital punishment policies, suggest that sensibilities were changing much earlier than is implied by Gatrell’s work, which argues for a sudden change in the early 1830s. Garland’s model of a simple transition from an ‘early modern’ to a ‘modern’ mode of capital punishment is also questioned. The long eighteenth century stands out, both in England and on the continent, as a separate and distinct era characterized by capital punishment diversity and penal differentiation, an era that was neither early modern or modern, but had its own logic within which post-execution punishment played an important role.