gibbeting – Old Weird Scotland

Some unusual cases and executions in 16th and 17th century Edinburgh:

30th Jan 1603: Francis Moubray breaks his neck and dies escaping from Edinburgh castle. Next day was taken to gallows, hanged, quartered, beheaded, and displayed at the four city gates.

2nd July 1602: Alexander Rowan (ane cruel man) hanged for “setting ane woman’s bare arse on ane girdill quhen it wes red hot”

3rd July 1602: Johne Stewart beheaded for “cutting off ane man’s privat members”

1572: Christian Gudson, executed for biting off her husband’s finger

27th April 1601: For hanging a picture of the king and queen from a nail on the gibbet (to keep it off the ground), Archibald Cornwall hanged, gibbetted, and burnt.

13th May 1572: Two men and a woman hanged for bringing leeks and salt into Edinburgh without permission

20th February 1598: Thomas Dobie, for drowning himself in a quarry, he was hurled through town and hanged at the gallows.

16th June 1604: Robert Weir (for murder) was tied to a cartwheel and broken with the coulter of a plough.

In November 1810, Alexander Gillan was hanged for the rape and murder of Elspet Lamb. The judge ordered his body be hung in chains at the site of the murder on Spynie Muir, near Hill of Garmouth. He was the last person to be gibbeted in Scotland.

The judge declared that Gillan’s body would hang “until the fowls of the air pick the flesh of your body and your bones bleach and whiten in the winds of Heaven!”

It’s noteworthy also that the second to last gibbeting was 31 years previously in 1779. Scotland had given up hanging corpses in chains but special exception was made for Gillan.

Gillan’s body was cut down and buried fairly quickly, unlike David Edwards, who was hanged in Ayr in 1758. His body was gibbeted for so long (at least 20 years) that it became part of the landscape and made it onto maps!