At a given signal from him the cart was drawn
from under the man's feet, leaving him swinging and struggling for
breath in the air, where he remained till life was extinct. The judge
when passing the death-sentence always forewarned the prisoner what
would happen to him, and that he would be taken from there to the
prison, and thence to the place of execution, "where you will be hanged
by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead." Why he repeated the last
word over and over again we could not explain. It was spoken very
solemnly, and after the first time he used it there was a pause, and
after the second, a longer pause, and then came the third in an almost
sepulchral tone of voice, while a death-like silence pervaded the court,
each word sounding like an echo of the one before it:
dead!--dead!!--dead!!! Perhaps, like the Trinity, it gave a sense of
completion.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK.]
The executions in those days were public, and many people attended them
as they would a fair or the races; and when held outside the towns, as
at York, a riotous mob had it in its power either to lynch or rescue the
prisoner. But hangings were afterwards arranged to take place on a
scaffold outside the prison wall, to which the prisoner could walk from
the inside of the prison.
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