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British forms of punishment
when the death penalty was abolished, the main form of capital punishment in Britain was hanging. Initially, this involved placing a noose around the neck of the condemned and suspending them from the branch of a tree. Ladders and carts were used to hang people from wooden gallows, which entailed death by asphyxiation. -
Period: to
The Bloody Code
Britain’s ‘Bloody Code’ was the name given to the legal system between the late-17th and early-19th century which made more than 200 offences – many of them petty – punishable by death. Statutes introduced between 1688 and 1815 covered primarily property offences, such as pickpocketing, cutting down trees and shoplifting.