Short Cuts: The route to Tyburn Tree
Matthew Beaumont, 20 June 2013
At midnight on the eve of a hanging day or ‘hanging fair’, usually a Monday, the bellman of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate recited these verses to the men and women due to be executed:
All you that in the condemn’d Holds do lie, Prepare you, for to Morrow you shall die.
The next morning, between nine and ten, a procession left the prison, to the sound of church bells, first...
