Why an island in Sydney Harbour is called Pinchgut
Gibbeting, or hanging in chains, meant displaying an executed criminal's body in public as a warning. Britain wrote it into law in 1751 and abolished it in 1834. The practice left traces across the old empire, from a Sydney islet named after a starving convict to a grim landmark Paul Revere rode past.
Judges could add gibbeting to a death sentence under common law, and England's Murder Act of 1751 made it one of two fates for a murderer's body, the other being public dissection; burial was forbidden. It was reserved mostly for traitors, murderers, highwaymen and pirates, and gibbets stood beside highways, often at crossroads, and along rivers where travellers could not miss them. Pirates in London were hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping, and the most notorious, such as Captain William Kidd in May 1701, were then displayed farther downstream as a warning to sailors.
Deterrence often misfired. When Edward II displayed two rebel enemies near Bristol, locals treated their remains as relics, used them in protests and even reported miracles at the site. Samuel Pepys found the custom disgusting, Christians argued that punishment should end at death, and critics complained the displays embarrassed the law in front of foreign visitors while turning into macabre tourist sights.
The custom travelled with the empire. In Sydney, a convict named Thomas Hill was reportedly left on a harbour rock for a week on bread and water, which is said to have pinched his gut and given the island its name; a gibbet went up there in 1796, and the site later became Fort Denison. The Royal Navy used Hangman's Beach in Halifax Harbour to warn passing crews against desertion. In 1755 an enslaved man named Mark was gibbeted at Charlestown, Massachusetts, and twenty years later Paul Revere passed his remains on his famous ride. In Quebec, Marie-Josephte Corriveau, hanged in chains in 1763, became a folklore legend.
By the early 19th century the practice was fading. Scotland's last case came in 1810, and England's final pair of cases, in 1832, involved a Jarrow miner, William Jobling, and a bookbinder, James Cook, and reflected shifting public attitudes. The Hanging in Chains Act of 1834 ended it formally, though a colonial case in Van Diemen's Land in 1837 caused a public outcry.
Source: Gibbeting
