The Dark History Of Death By Gibbet

"See there, see there! What yonder swings/And creaks 'mid whistling rain? — / Gibbet and steel, th' accursed wheel; / A murderer in his chain.—"

This excerpt, from Sir Walter Scott's 1807 poem "William and Helen"  provides enough details to envision exactly how ghastly gibbeting was. As a form of criminal deterrence in Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Europe and England, it actually wasn't especially common, as gibbeting expert Sarah Tarlow, professor of archeology at the University of Leicester, says on Atlas Obscura. Sometimes criminals were locked in cages alive, sometimes they were already dead. Most often it was done for capital offenses but sometimes it was done for crimes like stealing mail, piracy, and smuggling, per All That's Interesting. 

You can imagine what it looked and smelled like if a gibbet happened to be placed near your home, as was sometimes the case. The cage creaking in the night, blown by the wind that carried the moans and shrieks of those not yet dead. Bodies weren't removed from gibbets when the criminal died; they were left there for years to rot and desiccate and yes, be pecked by birds. 

This is why gibbeting, wielded as a cruel tool of law enforcement to prevent criminal activity, was a massive public event. Even the mere act of erecting the gibbet, before its cage was fastening, "attracted big, jubilant crowds, sometimes in the tens of thousands."

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