In remembrance of the bloody fact: Coins, public execution and the gibbet in Hanoverian England

Poole, Stephen

Abstract

Noteworthy eighteenth and nineteenth century public hangings were often marked by the circulation of associative souvenirs, and sometimes of coins. Some, like those professionally minted to mark the execution of James Blomfield Rush in 1849, restricted themselves to the recording of names and dates and were offered for sale by enterprising engravers. Others took a more partisan line however, and two rougher examples, individually unique but serially produced, are considered here: those struck to mark the execution of the sailor John Curtis for the murder of a Jewish pedlar near Salisbury in 1768 (a charge he steadfastly refuted), and those commemorating the respectable London banker, Henry Fauntleroy, executed for forgery and embezzlement in 1824. While the latter consistently represented the condemned man as a ‘bilking banker’ and a ‘robber of widows and orphans’, we don’t know who made them or how they passed into circulation. In Curtis’s case, however, we do. These, of which at least seven have survived, were commissioned by Abraham Woolf, a Jewish associate of the murdered pedlar, and manufactured by the Jewish engraver, Isaac Levy, as commemorative gifts for the under sheriff and several prosecution witnesses. But anti-semitic public opinion took Curtis’s side, damaging the reputations of both Woolf and Levy and forcing them to make public explanations of their intention. Both sets of coins are now examined, not only in terms of the influence they exerted on contemporary public opinion but as exemplars of the wider material culture of public punishment.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: Dec 15, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 2, 2024
• Pages: 93-111
• Book Title: S. Lloyd and T. Millet (Eds.), Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect, 1750-1850.
• ISBN: 978-1-911300-94-6
• Keywords: numismatics, crime, tokens, gibbet, commemoration
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10249703
• Publisher URL: https://www.paulholberton.com/product-page/tokens-of-love-loss-and-disrespect
• Related Public URLs: https://www.paulholberton.com/
• Contract Date: Sep 30, 2022