Caxton Gibbet

Caxton Gibbet is a small knoll on Ermine Street (now the A1198) in England, running between London and Huntingdon, near its crossing with the road (now the A428) between St Neots and Cambridge. There are tales of murderers being hanged and displayed at the nearby village of Caxton in the 1670s, and records in a court case that the gibbet was still there in 1745. Several local writers say that it was no longer there by the early decades of the nineteenth century. There is a modern replica which can be seen in photographs dating back to 1900, the erection of which may have been connected with the nearby inn of the same name.

It is reputed to be a gruesome example of the cage variation of the gibbet into which live victims were placed until they died from starvation, dehydration or exposure. After execution dead bodies were certainly suspended in cages as a warning, and may have been here. There are a number of folk tales reported on various websites and in secondary sources of people being hanged at Caxton, none of which can be verified from primary sources. The most gruesome concerns the murder of a man called Partridge, either by a poacher or a man who thought Partridge had killed his dog. The murderer, sometime after having escaped abroad for a period, boasted, or was otherwise detected of the crime and ordered to be gibbeted alive. In some versions a local baker who offered him bread suffered a similar fate. There is no contemporaneous record of anything that confirms any part of this story, either in court or burial records. The practical difficulties of enforcing this penalty would be insuperable. There is little evidence of this practice anywhere in England.

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