1. The most important contributions include V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Executions and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), chaps 1–5; Douglas Hay, ‘Property, ideology, and the criminal law’, in Hay et al., eds, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975), 17–63; Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), chap. 10; Thomas Laquer, ‘Crowds, carnivals and the state in English executions, 1604–1868’, in A.L. Beier et al., eds, The First Modem Society (1989), 305–55; Peter Linebaugh, ‘The ordinary of Newgate and his account’, in J.S. Cockburn ed., Crime in England, 1500–1800 (1977), 246–69; J.A. Sharpe, Judicial Punishment in England (1990), chap. 2; id., ‘“Last dying speeches”: religion, ideology, and public execution in seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), 147–65. A forthcoming book by Andrea McKenzie looks at the cultures and practices of Tyburn: Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (Hambledon and London Books). For the forms and symbolism of rituals elsewhere see R.A. Bosco, ‘Lecturers at the pillory: the early American execution sermon’, American Quarterly, 30 (1978), 156–76; A. Blok, ‘The symbolic vocabulary of public executions’, in J. Starr and J.F. Collier eds, History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology (1989), 31–54; Esther Cohen, “‘To die a criminal for the public good”: the execution ritual in late medieval Paris’, in B.S. Bachrach and D. Nicholas eds, Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe (1990), 285–304; R.J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996), chaps 2–5; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression, from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984); chaps 2–4; Richard van Dumen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans. Elizabeth Neu (Oxford, 1990), chaps 5–6.
2. Randall McGowen, ‘The well-ordered prison: England, 1780–1865’, in N. Morris and D.J. Rothman eds, The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford, 1996), 78–109.
3. Brian Hogan, 'Crime and the Criminal Law', in Then and Now: Commemorating 175 Years of Law Bookselling and Publishing (1974), 116
4. quoted (and paraphrased) in Greg T. Smith, 'Civilized people don't want to see that kind of thing: the decline of public physical punishment in London, 1760-1840', in Carolyn Strange ed., Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion (Vancouver, 1996), 48, n.1. This section contains some materials and ideas which Simon Devereaux was kind enough to let me use, and which will appear in revised form in his forthcoming essay, 'New directions in the history of crime and punishment in England.'
5. See the first-rate discussion of the abolition of public execution in Randall McGowen, ‘Civilizing punishment: the end of public execution in England’, JBS, 3 (1994), 257–82.