The New Newgate Calendar

On this date in 2007, Singapore hanged Leong Siew Chor. Perpetrator of a crime evocatively known as the Kallang Body Parts Murder, Leong circa mid-2005... read more »

On the morning of Thursday 29 November 1877 the Wandsworth Police Court was full of shopkeepers and traders keen to witness the outcome of a case brought... read more »

From The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France, concerning the rough handling the king deployed in an attempt to squelch the Breton... read more »

William T. Stead in his prison uniform At Worship Street Police Court in late November 1887 a man was brought up on a charge of abducting an under-age... read more »

Baldasar Cossa,* in Romandiola cardinalis Ecclesieque legatus pro Ecclesia romana, Astorgium Manfredum, paulo ante dominum Faventie, publice decapitari... read more »

In the light of yesterday’s happy announcement of a royal engagement I thought I’d feature a (sort of) royal story from Victorian London’s... read more »

A brush-maker drilling holes in the backs of brushes The Police courts weren’t there just for the prosecution of petty criminals, they could function... read more »

From the London Times, Nov. 28, 1927: (From our own correspondent.) MADRID, Nov. 28. At Saragossa this morning three men convicted of murder and robbery... read more »

Little primary documentation about these hangings appears to be conveniently available absent a visit to Williamsburg’s archives, but the bare outline... read more »

In a society where large numbers of Londoners lived quite close to the what became termed the ‘poverty line’* in the early twentieth century,... read more »

I am used more to writing about Victorian crime than more modern offences, and as part of my writing, I’ve often read the work of others on infanticide,... read more »

Part of the role of a Police Court magistrate in Victorian London was to determine whether cases that came before them ought to be sent up through the... read more »

From The Original secession magazine, Volume 15 (1878), reprinting a public letter that had previously appeared in The People’s Journal: Sir, —... read more »

John Williamson was a Law student who lived in Queen’s Road, Bayswater. In November 1874 he entered the Spread Eagle pub  accompanied ... read more »

This date in 1883 saw the deaths of six Peruvian patriotic martyrs. These executions blackened the War of the Pacific, a conflict between Chile and an... read more »

This week my undergraduate students at Northampton will be looking at marital violence in history. I’ve set them reading by a variety of historians... read more »

Field-Cornet Willie Louw, a guerrilla in the Second Boer War, was shot by the British on this date in 1901. A nephew to the Scots-descended Dutch reform... read more »

In the spring of 1812, the parish church at Newnham-on-Severn was in need of a new curate. The Revd Mr Parsons held the perpetual curacy there, but he... read more »

St Margaret & St John’s Workshops in Westminster c.1875 Frederic Calvi was an Italian immigrant in London. Calvin worked as an engineer,... read more »

The first legal hanging in Gibson County, Indiana, took place on November 22, 1872, of a careless boy named Thomas Camp (“Kemp” by some early... read more »

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 21 November 2017. During much of October, newspapers and twitter feeds across the UK were abuzz with news of the miniseries Gunpowder’s... read more »

By the mid 1840s the Victorian reading public were familiar with the work of Charles Dickens and his stories of everyday life. Between 1837 (when the young... read more »

On this date in 1853, Nathaniel Mobbs hanged for killing his wife. Mobbs’s loutish drunken abuse was of Catherine Mobbs was audible to many neighbors... read more »

We are used to the idea that business works best when there is competition. Throughout the 1980s we were consistently told that privatised industry was... read more »

On this date in 2013, hoping “for people to think of me as a person who is filled with a lot of love for people, not filled with hate for people,”... read more »

In  November 1895 two women living in and around Harringay Park received disturbing letters in the post.  The letters contained threats and were... read more »

November 19 is the feast date of Diocletian martyr Saint Barlaam of Antioch.* A Cappadocian peasant, Barlaam defeated through righteous willpower a Roman... read more »

Emma Hawkins clearly loved books. In fact she sometimes became so caught up in the reading of books that she quite forgot where she was, or even that the... read more »

i>(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on... read more »

(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1787, Margaret Savage was publicly hanged in front of Newgate... read more »

Some of the cases that came before the Police Court magistrates seem particularly unimportant or trivial. It must have been quite frustrating, if not downright... read more »

The convict biographies of Thomas Limpus, Charlotte Walker, Annie Sullivan, William Buckley, Mark Jeffrey and Ikey Solomons will be exhibited in the latest... read more »

This is an unusual case, and one that remained unresolved (as many did that came before the London Police courts). In mid November 1867 a solicitor approached... read more »

On this date in 1880,* Russian revolutionaries Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov were hanged at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress.... read more »

We are delighted to publish this guest post by John Owen Havard, Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, whose forthcoming work includes... read more »

We are all probably familiar with the character of Fagin, created by Charles Dickens as the central villain of Oliver Twist. Fagin is a receiver of... read more »

On this date in 1892, globetrotting murderer Thomas Neill Cream hanged. Act I Glasgow-born, Cream grew up in Canada and did his parents proud by becoming... read more »

On this date in 1879, a third of a conspiracy known as the “Blue-Eyed Six” — guess why — hanged for murder. Having taken out insurance... read more »

George Carter was tired. In fact he was so tired that he felt he needed, and deserved, a holiday. Sadly for him his employer, the North London Metropolitan... read more »

From the Newgate Calendar, which misstates the date of Montgomery’s execution because of course it does. In the absence of a modern bankruptcy framework,... read more »

The Soho Bazaar, c.1815 Mary Allen was almost certainly a pseudonym. The woman using this device was quite respectable and claimed to be protecting her... read more »

Some of the cases that come before the nineteenth-century magistracy are useful in revealing how criminals operated. The most common type of offending... read more »

Cuba executed thirteen people in the course of this week in 1963 as CIA agents. This date marked the middle group, as detailed in the Nov. 13, 1963 New... read more »

On this date in 1942, the Swiss artillerist Ernst Schrämli was shot for treason. The dogged independence of Switzerland during World War II presented... read more »

O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band... read more »

On this date in 1735, Elizabeth Armstrong* was executed at Tyburn for winning a drunken brawl. The account of the events that brought Armstrong to the... read more »

The Havelock Arms in Albion Drive, Dalston in the 20th century On the morning of the 10 November 1888 the reports from the London Police Courts in The... read more »

On this date in 1641, one of Denmark’s most famous witches suffered at the stake. Maren Splid, Spliid, or Splids (English Wikipedia entry | Danish)... read more »

If the Match Girls’ strike of 1888 and the Great Dock Strike of August 1889 can be seen as two of the most important victories for the British Trades... read more »

On this date in 1873, twelve more Cuban revolutionaries condemned by the Spanish military were shot in Santiago de Cuba, raising the overall November 7-8... read more »