page_title: Gibbeting
section_title: Variants
hierarchical_section_title: Gibbeting / Display / Variants
caption_attribution_description: The principal enter of Corciano fortified medieval town; near the arc, the cylindric tower and on the background the main tower in the center of the town.
context_page_description: A gibbet is any instrument of public execution, but gibbeting refers to the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. Occasionally, the gibbet was also used as a method of execution, with the criminal being left to die of exposure, thirst and/or starvation. The term gibbet may also be used to refer to the practice of placing a criminal on display within a gibbet. This practice is also called "hanging in chains".
context_section_description: In some cases, the bodies would be left until their clothes rotted or even until the bodies were almost completely decomposed, after which the bones would be scattered.
  In cases of drawing and quartering, the body of the criminal was cut into four or five portions, with the several parts often gibbeted in different places.
  So that the public display might be prolonged, bodies were sometimes coated in tar or bound in chains. Sometimes, body-shaped iron cages were used to contain the decomposing corpses. For example, in March 1743 in the town of Rye, East Sussex, Allen Grebell was murdered by John Breads. Breads was imprisoned in the Ypres Tower and then hanged, after which his body was left to rot for more than 20 years in an iron cage on Gibbet Marsh. The cage and Breads's skull are still kept in the town hall.
  Another example of the cage variation is the gibbet iron, on display at the Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The cage, created in 1781, was intended to be used to display the body of convicted pirate Thomas Wilkinson, so that sailors on passing ships might be warned of the consequences of piracy; Wilkinson's planned execution never took place, so the gibbet was never used.
  An example of an iron cage used to string up bodies on a gibbet can still be seen in the Westgate Museum at Winchester.
caption: Hanging cage at the main gate to Corciano, Province of Perugia, Italy
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