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A criminal suspened in a gibbet and left to starve to death.

Gibbet refers to several similar instruments used in the execution of criminals. The term gibbeting specifically refers to the public display of executed criminals. This post mortem punishment was used for such people as highwaymen and pirates.

The general idea behind public executions was to set an example, and the punishment usually took place very near to the scene of the crime. Gibbeting originally involved the suspension of the criminal in a metal cage until they starved. It was a very prolonged death. One of the last cases of live gibbeting in England was in the 17th-century on Gibbet Moor, Derbyshire. The condemned man was a tramp who had murdered a woman by pouring boiling fat down her throat when she refused him food. Left to die slowly in his gibbet, the tramp's torture was drawn out when a well-meaning traveller gave him food. It is said that screams from the moors so distressed the Duke of Devonshire that he personally acted to end live gibbeting in Derbyshire.

Following the abolition of live gibbeting, criminals were hung to death and then, "after they had been hanged in the normal way, their body was taken down and then coated in pitch. It was then put into an iron cage which they had usually been previously measured for and had been specially made for them. This cage went over the head, torso and upper legs. The cage and body were then suspended again by a chain from the gibbet which was like a simple gallows but normally higher and set up at a prominent place, [for example] a crossroads or the top of a hill. The body would be left until it had rotted away - perhaps a year or more - to serve as a reminder of what happened to these classes of criminal. Gibbeting also denied the criminal a decent burial which was a punishment in itself in those days (16th-18th centuries)."

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