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This chapter provides the reader with an introduction to the study. It highlights the key arguments and themes to be addressed and details the types of sources used and the methodology adopted in the generation of the work. In exploring the importance of the period between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it contextualises Scotland’s capital punishment history against the backdrop of other key events and developments in this period. In addition, the chapter situates the current study within the broader Western European historical field focused upon the changing nature of execution practices in this period.

This chapter demonstrates that, following the 1707 Act of Union, Scotland maintained its own distinct legal and court systems. It highlights that many of the capital statutes that made up the eighteenth-century’s infamous ‘Bloody Code’ were not extended to Scotland. In addition, the chapter explores the nuanced practices of the Scottish central criminal courts and demonstrates their crucial importance to the country’s implementation of capital punishment. Furthermore, it establishes geographical and chronological patterns and trends in Scotland’s use of the death sentence as a response to the commission of murder and property offences.

This chapter examines three key periods in Scotland’s capital punishment history between 1740 and 1834, namely the mid-eighteenth century during the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion; the 1780s, when the temporary cessation of transportation impacted upon the courts’ ability to sentence suitably severe punishments that fell short of death for potentially capital crimes; and the early nineteenth century, a period of rising levels of capital convictions and debates over the merits of public punishment. The chapter explores the legal and press responses towards capitally convicted malefactors and demonstrates that, although there were discernible similarities with practices in England, an examination of the previously neglected Scottish experience offers a unique perspective of Britain’s use of capital punishment at these three crucial junctures.

This Chapter focuses upon the Scottish women who faced the death sentence between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides an investigation into the crimes they committed, including an analysis of motives, victims and chosen method of killing in murder cases and the aggravating circumstances discernible in the small number of cases where women were executed for property offences. Combining this examination with a reading of responses to these women in the courts and in the press allows the chapter to question what we can glean about wider responses to female criminality. In turn, it explores the importance of judicial discretion when deciding which of the women brought before the courts of Scotland would face the hangman’s noose.

Chapter 5 provides some insight into the scene at public executions in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It highlights the role of the key protagonists in the theatre of the gallows including the condemned criminals, the crowds gathered to witness the spectacle unfold and the scaffold authorities who were responsible for carrying out executions. It demonstrates that this period was one of fundamental transition in how the event was shaped in practice. In addition, the chapter provides an analysis of Scottish execution practices in this period and shows that, by the mid-eighteenth century, sanguine displays of pre-mortem suffering were gradually being replaced by the infliction of post-mortem punishments upon the criminal corpse.

This chapter focuses upon the use of dissection as a post-mortem punishment in Scotland between the 1752 Murder Act and the 1832 Anatomy Act. It investigates contemporary beliefs and fears surrounding the dead body in this period, particularly those over its disposal. Furthermore, it highlights instances where criminals and their relatives were more preoccupied with the fate of the body than with the execution itself. However, it demonstrates that most of the criminal bodies yielded by the Murder Act were dissected within Scotland’s main universities by anatomy professors before an audience of medical students and, rather than solely serving as a punitive measure, these dissections offered the opportunity for pedagogical demonstration and the conducting of original research.

This chapter examines the post-mortem punishment of hanging criminal corpses in chains in Scotland. It provides an analysis of the types of crimes that led offenders to the gibbet cage, the chronology of the punishment and the locations at which it was carried out, and demonstrates Scotland’s unique implementation of the punishment by offering some comparison with its use in England. In addition, the chapter seeks to gauge responses to the criminal corpse in chains through an examination of the longevity of the punishment and an exploration of the motives behind the illegal removal of bodies from the gibbet cage.

This chapter synthesises the key findings and conclusions generated throughout the study. It explores how its examination of capital punishment and execution practices in Scotland can be situated, and can reinforce some of the broad trends, within the established British, and to some extent the wider Western European, narrative. However, it also argues that the crucial caveats identified throughout the study demonstrate that Scotland was unique in its implementation of the death sentence and in its use of post-mortem infamies, and thus the study provides a fresh perspective of Britain’s capital punishment history during the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.