29 August 1981: As France abolishes the guillotine at last, Michael Parkin looks back at its English precursor, the Halifax gibbet

The decision by the French Cabinet to abolish the guillotine has come rather late. Halifax in West Yorkshire dismantled its “guillotine” – known as the gibbet – in 1650.

By one of those curious twists of history Joseph-Ignace Guillotin has been most widely credited with the introduction in 1792 of a clean-death machine. Such a device was known and used much earlier in a number of European countries, and in Halifax at least 400 years earlier.

From the archive, 29 July 1976: Guillotine returns after two years Read more

Because of this we now speak of a parliamentary debate being “guillotined” instead of being “gibbeted” after the Halifax device, or “maidened” after a similar machine used in Scotland. Halifax operated what was known as “Gibbet Law” until the last execution on its gibbet in 1650. Any thief caught with stolen goods worth 13½ pence in his hands, or on his back, or any thief confessing to the theft, was beheaded after three market or meeting days of being caught or condemned.

This swift justice gave Halifax a fearsome reputation. Thieves would chant the incantation “From Hull, Hell and Halifax, good Lord deliver us.”

There were no tricoteuses at the Halifax gibbet, dropping stitches as the blade fell. But there was a wealth of folklore about it. Daniel Defoe, in the first edition of his A Tour thro’ Britain, said he was told in Halifax that if the condemned man could snatch his head from the block between the time that the order was given for the pin to be pulled, releasing the blade, and the time the blade reached the block, he was free to run for his life.

The executioner was entitled to chase him down the hill. If he could catch the thief before he reached the river, he was returned to the gibbet; if the thief got across the river, he was free.

Defoe was told that one condemned man did get free and across the river.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leading figure of the French Revolution Maximilien de Robespierre is guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, 28 July 1794. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy/Alamy

One of the reputed customs with the Halifax gibbet was that if the thief had stolen a horse, sheep or cow, the animal concerned, or one of the same kind, would be attached by a rope to the pin holding the blade, so that it could send its abductor “all headless to heaven and hell.”

Beheading seems to have been used as a method of execution at Halifax only intermittently, mainly at times of turmoil and great social stress. The records, though far from complete showed that about 61 people died on the block.

Not all thieves were beheaded. In 1649, just before the gibbet was abandoned, two men – both presumably thieves – had their ears nailed to the wooden uprights of the gibbet.

The guillotine had its most notorious use as a terror weapon in a bloody class war – the French Revolution. In a way, the Halifax gibbet was also used in a class war, for the protection of the haves against the have-nots.

Its thief purpose was seen as a deterrent for those people who might steal from the clothiers of the town. After it had been abandoned, and superseded by the common law of the land, Daniel Defoe asked the clothiers about its deterrent effect – was cloth-stealing more prevalent now that the gibbet had gone? He was told that if anything cloth thefts were more common.

Halifax takes a rather macabre pride in its gibbet.

A full scale replica of it stands in a small park at the end of Gibbet Street. There is no description of its history on the site. A stranger might wonder what a guillotine was doing, stuck in rather a drab quarter of the town.

Halifax used the gibbet while all around were busy hanging their thieves. (Though not at Dover, if a book in the Halifax reference library is to be believed. There convicted thieves used to be pushed from the top of the cliffs.)

Nobody now knows why Halifax abandoned its gibbet. One suggestion is that “tender consciences” prevailed. At any rate it stands as a bloody relic of a time when swift punishment was given to ingangthief and outgangthief – thieves who had stolen inside or outside the Halifax area.