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field. Feebly, Kelly retaliated that the College had been keeping the body parts in ‘an unattractive way’ and that he had ‘buried them with dignity’. Jailing Kelly, the judge disagreed and called it ‘a revolting theft’. Kelly later described the police as having ‘raped’ his studio.
        This case made legal history as it established that human body parts were capable of being property if ‘they have acquired different attributes by virtue of the application of skill, such as dissection or preservation techniques, for exhibition or teaching purposes’.

    THREE MORE LONDON EXECUTION SITES
    Charing Cross

    Until 1660 if you had stood where the National Gallery is now and looked down on what is now Trafalgar Square there would have been no Nelson’s Column in front of you (it wasn’t completed until 1844), but you would have seen a gallows close to where the Column is today. Many people died here over the years for a variety of crimes ranging from pickpocketing to murder.

    The most famous people hanged here were the so-called ‘regicides’: people who had been involved in putting King Charles I to death. Thirteen of them were deliberately executed here because it was just a short walk away from where Charles I had himself been executed at Whitehall in 1649. The spot where the regicides were executed is where the statue of Charles I on horseback is today.

    Thomas Harrison was the first of the unlucky 13 and went to his death, says Samuel Pepys, ‘as cheerfully as any man could In that condition’ ie about to be hung, drawn and quartered. Harrison in one account is supposed to have given his executioner ‘a box on the ear’ when they cut into his body to quarter him. They made sure to hang Harrison looking towards the Banqueting House where Charles I had died.

    It shows how jaded Pepys was by the frequency of executions in his day that after the quote about Harrison he immediately goes on to talk about some oysters he gave to some friends later that same day.

    Lincoln’s Inn Fields

    In 1586 Anthony Babington and 13 other malcontents plotted to kill Queen Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The queen’s spy-master, Walsingham, found out about the plot and Babington and the rest were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered as traitors. Lincolns Inn Fields was chosen because Babington’s house had been round the corner at Holborn and the plot had been hatched in the area.

    The executions took place where the little bandstand is today in the centre of the Fields. Seven of the conspirators were to be executed on the first day, and the remaining seven on the second day. In the event it was a rare example in London’s history of when a hostile, execution-hardened crowd who had flocked here precisely because they wanted to see men put to death by hanging, drawing and quartering, rebelled. The crowd became sickened by the sadistic prolonging of the process and began to murmur, and appeared restless and potentially mutinous. Queen Elizabeth I herself was informed and on the second day the remaining seven conspirators were allowed to be hanged until they were dead first, before the mutilations began.

    Wapping

    From the sixteenth century, Wapping, by the Thames in east London, is known as the execution site where pirates kicked their heels. The Captain Kidd pub today is close to where the executions would have taken place.

    The procedure was that the pirate, or other criminal guilty of crimes at sea, was taken here by cart from Newgate. A silver oar accompanied the prisoner as the symbol of authority and the cart contained the prisoner’s own coffin too. After the hanging the body was slung into the coffin and sometimes then, in what was for some prisoners a fate worse than death, taken off to the Surgeons’ Hall where its dissection was a matter of public display. After being hacked at by various surgeons and students for up to a week in public, the body, much the worse for