Oh Tyburn! coud’st thou Reason and Dispute; Coud’st thou but Judge as well as Execute; How often would’st thou change the Felon’s Doom, And truss some stern Chief-Justice in his room? Then should thy sturdy Posts support the Laws, No Promise, Frown, nor popular Applause, Shou’d sway the Bench to favour a bad Cause. Nor Scarlet Gown, swell’d with Poetick Fury, Scare a false Verdict from a trembling Jury. Justice, with steady Hand and even Scales, Should stand upright, as if sustain’d by Hales. Yet still, in Matters doubtful to decide, A little bearing tow’rds the milder side. DRYDEN, _Miscellany Poems_, 5th ed., 1727, v. 126. ANNALS To tell fully the story of Tyburn for the six centuries of its existence would need many volumes. As a selection has to be made, I have chosen rather to take the older and less familiar incidents than to dwell on those of the eighteenth century, already well known. In telling the stories found in the old chronicles, I have refrained from giving in my own version what I found adequately told by the old writers. Thus, if I quote Stow, Hall, or Holinshed for events that happened long before their time, it is, of course, not as first-hand authorities, but because their rendering is certainly more interesting than any I could give. The reader will not fail to observe how extremely meagre are these annals for the first centuries of Tyburn. For the first hundred years, 1177 to 1273, there appear here only eight cases. For this century and down to the year 1535, I have, I think, given all the Tyburn tragedies recorded by the old chroniclers. The explanation of this meagreness is, that the chroniclers noted only executions arising out of political incidents or out of social incidents of extraordinary interest: only in times comparatively late do we get glimpses of the work done by the gallows on small offenders. All through the long era of religious persecutions we hear little of ordinary criminals: only now and again some number is mentioned of those executed or tumbled into a pit together with a priest. I may be asked how I arrive at the conclusion stated in the introductory remarks, that a moderate estimate would place the number of those executed at Tyburn at fifty thousand. As the gallows was at work for six hundred years, this number would give an average of less than one hundred a year. Four streams of victims converged on Tyburn. The gallows was fed from the courts of Westminster and Guildhall (see, for example, cases in these Annals under the years 1242, 1295, 1441, and 1495). But the great purveyors of the gallows were the Middlesex Sessions and the Old Bailey Sessions, the first for the county, the latter for the City and its Liberties.