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Early nineteenth-century Britain witnessed rising numbers of offenders facing capital punishment and a plethora of legal and public discourse debating the criminal justice system. This article will examine a distinct Scottish response to the problem in the form of crime scene executions. By the turn of the nineteenth century it had long been the established practice of the Scottish courts to order that capitally convicted offenders would be executed at an established 'common place'. However, between 1801 and 1841, the decision was taken to execute 37 offenders at the scene of their crimes. This article argues that in the face of an unprecedented number of offenders facing the hangman's noose the Scottish judges chose to exercise this penal option which had not been used to a similar extent since the mid-eighteenth century. In turn these events had a multiplicity of impact and provoked responses ranging from a morbid curiosity to witness the spectacle to anxiety and outright disdain at its intrusion into areas previously unsullied by the last punishment of the law.

This limited, finite series is based on the substantive outputs from a major, multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating the meanings, treatment, and uses of the criminal corpse in Britain. It is a vehicle for methodological and substantive advances in approaches to the wider history of the body. Focussing on the period between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries as a crucial period in the formation and transformation of beliefs about the body, the series explores how the criminal body had a prominent presence in popular culture as well as science, civic life and medico-legal activity. It is historically significant as the site of overlapping and sometimes contradictory understandings between scientific anatomy, criminal justice, popular medicine, and social geography.More information about this series at

The focus of Part I of this volume was to gain an understanding of the implementation of the death sentence in Scotland. It provided an exploration of the contextual and judicial drivers that impacted upon its use and quantitative analyses of focal periods to enhance our knowledge of Scotland's capital punishment history between 1740 and 1834. Part II will now turn to present a qualitative exploration of public executions in Scotland and an investigation into the changing nature of capital punishment and execution practices across the period. It will also examine the implementation of the post-mortem punishments of dissection and hanging in chains, and situate their usage within the broader bodily punishment narrative.The current chapter will provide some insight into the spectacle of the scaffold in Scotland between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century by drawing upon the extensive source materials gathered, including newspapers and execution broadsides, which offer rich qualitative details of the scene at the public execution. The opening section will begin by questioning the role of the key actors of the event, namely the condemned criminals and the concourse of spectators gathered to witness them suffer their lamentable fate. The multitude of behaviours and responses that the execution spectacle could generate will also be considered. Following this exploration of the scene at the gallows, the chapter will examine the changes made to the logistics of the public execution including those related to its location. In Edinburgh, between 1660 and 1784, executions were conducted at the Grassmarket following a procession CHAPTER 5

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