Executing Magic in the Modern Era by Owen Davies & Francesca Matteoni

Author:Owen Davies & Francesca Matteoni
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Providential Gallows

Dotted across the English landscape are some two dozen or so ‘ hangman’s stones’ that also served as symbolic warnings to would-be thieves. These are usually Bronze Age standing stones, wayside crosses, or boundary and milestones. Writing in 1803, the Gloucestershire antiquarian, Thomas Rudge , wrote of one such example in the county, ‘An ancient rude stone, about four feet high, commonly called Hangman’s stone, with a vulgar tradition annexed to it, not worth recording, stands in the road, about two miles from Cirencester, and is now converted into a mile-stone.’ The vulgar tradition referred to was related by an earlier, and less pompous, Gloucester antiquarian, who explained that it was called Hangman’s Stone because ‘it is said, a fellow resting a sheep thereon, (which he had stolen, and tied its legs together for the convenience of carrying it) was there strangled, by the animal’s getting its legs round his neck in struggling’. 14 The same story of the asphyxiation of a sheep thief resting upon a stone with his ill-gotten carcass was attributed to most of the other hangman’s stones, though a mid-nineteenth-century poem records the similar fate of a Leicestershire deer poacher named John of Oxley :

There was Oxley on one side the stone,

On the other the down-hanging deer;

The burden had slipp’d, and his neck it had nipped;

He was hanged by his prize – all was clear!

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