Abu Juwairiya
Junior Member
"For hundreds of years, the public sport that Britain organised itself around was hanging. Up until the 19th Century, the English had more than two hundred excuses to string up their fellow men.
You could be hanged for sodomy, fraud, and theft. Even spending too much time with gypsies could win you a date with the gallows. In many small towns, hangings were greeted as enthusiastically as parades. Parents would pack a picnic lunch and bring their children along to watch. Visiting lords would watch the ritualised killings through opera glasses while sipping sweet port on their hosts balconies.
'Lunch and a hanging' was the rough equivalent of 'dinner and a movie', a generic and widely accepted formula for a wholesome first date.
Executions were instructional, reviewing the slavish feelings of fear and awe that kept British society running as well as saving a bit of money on keeping the inmate population housed and fed.....
Hangings continued to be carried out in public until 1868, when at long last the immortal souls of Britain's convicts started being passed up to their maker in the privacy of their cells." (Source: "The Evil Empire" By Steven A. Grasse, P 91, 2007)
You could be hanged for sodomy, fraud, and theft. Even spending too much time with gypsies could win you a date with the gallows. In many small towns, hangings were greeted as enthusiastically as parades. Parents would pack a picnic lunch and bring their children along to watch. Visiting lords would watch the ritualised killings through opera glasses while sipping sweet port on their hosts balconies.
'Lunch and a hanging' was the rough equivalent of 'dinner and a movie', a generic and widely accepted formula for a wholesome first date.
Executions were instructional, reviewing the slavish feelings of fear and awe that kept British society running as well as saving a bit of money on keeping the inmate population housed and fed.....
Hangings continued to be carried out in public until 1868, when at long last the immortal souls of Britain's convicts started being passed up to their maker in the privacy of their cells." (Source: "The Evil Empire" By Steven A. Grasse, P 91, 2007)