Hangmen and Executioners

(1) Bull is the earliest hangman whose name survives (about 1593).

(2) Jock Sutherland.

(3) Derrick, who cut off the head of Essex in 1601.

(4) Gregory. Father and son, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott (1647).

(5) Gregory Brandon (about 1648).

(6) Richard Brandon, his son, who executed Charles I.

(7) Squire Dun, mentioned by Hudibras (part iii. c. 2).

(8) Jack Ketch (1678) executed Lord Russell and the Duke of Monmouth.

(9) Rose, the butcher (1686); but Jack Ketch was restored to office the same year.

(10) Edward Dennis (1780), introduced as a character in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.

(11) Thomas Cheshire, nicknamed “Old Cheese.”

(12) John Calcraft; Marwood; Berry; etc.

(13) Of foreign executioners, the most celebrated are Little John; Capeluche, headsman of Paris during the terrible days of the Armagnacs and Burgundians; and the two brothers Sanson, who were executioners during the first French Revolution.

⁂ Hudibras, under the name of Dun, “personates” Sir Arthur Hazelrig, “the activest” of the five members impeached by King Charles I. The other four were Monk, Walton, Morley, and Alured.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.