Term
Hanging in chains
also known as Gibbeting
Definition
The judicial practice of displaying the corpse of an executed criminal in an iron frame at a prominent waterside location, as a warning to mariners. After conventional hanging the body was dipped in tar to slow decomposition, fitted into a man-shaped iron cage, and suspended from a gallows at a river mouth or harbour entrance for periods of months or years. Notable cases in the codex: Calico Jack Rackham at Rackham’s Cay outside Port Royal (1720); William Kidd at Tilbury Point on the Thames (1701–1704); Klaus Störtebeker’s seventy-three crewmen at the Grasbrook outside Hamburg (1401).
