BURIALS AT TYBURN.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4614, 15 October 1923, Page 4

BURIALS AT TYBURN.

EXCAVATION WORKS* FEMALE EXECUTIONS. During the excavations now taknig place at the junction of Edgware Road and Oxford Street human remains have been discovered in the region of the old London gallows (says the Daily Mail). Although Tyburn ceased to be a place of public execution in 1783, and felons were executed at Newgate, the parishioners of St. Sepulchres’, the burial place of that district, objected ,to lying in proximity with felons, so the bodies were still sent to “the buryall ground neere to Tyborne.” Reference was made in our last issue to a woman’s skull which has been found, young and straightfeatured, and we moderns cannot help romancing, and wondering which of all the unhappy women who died there looked out through those eyes. Shakespeare tells of the execution of the Duchess pf Gloucester in 1440. while approximately a hundred years later Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, died there with some of her followers. Late in the 18th century Catherine Aaines, owner ,of an hotel in the Oxford Road,, decided the simplest way to rid herself of an unwanted husband was to chop him up and scatter his members to the four winds. She paid the price of her mistake at Tyburn. One of the most interesting women who died there was the poisoner, Mrs Turner, the creator of the once fashionable yellow starched ruffs and cuffs of the period of James I. She assisted the Countess of Somerset to dispose of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the judge, when sentencing her ’.o death, appeared to consider that the greatest of her “seven deadly sins” was the invention of yellow starch. He therefore ordered that she should be hanged therein, “ being the first inventor and wearer of that horrid garb, and that she should thus be the last to wear it.” The hangman, to increase the public dislike of the colour, had yellow cuffs and bands, and this ill repute banished for ever yellow starch. Among the nameless women who died at Tyburn was many a London girl who loved a highwayman. She greeted him from the steps of St. Sepulchre with flowers and kisses as he passed in the cart on the last ride from Newgate to the gallows. The “police” officers of Jonathan Wild, and mercenary spies, would signal to the authorities that this was a woman of " loose life,” and the halter would be her end. Whatever the sin,s may have been that led those, and many other women to Tyburn, the debt has been paid.