Always openly and in public

Organised by

• Department of History

This thesis examines the ‘public’ of judicial punishments in early modern London across a time period in which the capital transformed from a bound ‘towne’ to a metropolis with over half a million people. The efforts to deal with this growing population and the more troublesome members of society often revolved around several ‘public’ punishments in different areas of the capital. Public in the early modern world entailed several facets: the space in which these punishments occurred, the people in these spaces, and the purpose of the punishment to publicise a certain message about order and authority to these people. This thesis explores these facets and their developments across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that these punishments underwent significant changes: the public execution grew in complexity and interest into a popular event designed for public consumption; book burning transitioned from a private to a public ceremony, and when book burning declined, the pillory became a punishment based solely on exposing offenders to the public. The great interest in eighteenth-century London, particularly from the 1720s onwards, the ‘modernising age’, has generated a great deal of debate and extensive historiography on the role, purpose, and changing nature of public punishments in the capital and the evolving role of the populace. This thesis demonstrates that some of the major shifts in judicial policy and attitudes to crime in the modernising age were part of longer phenomena across the early modern period.