The Halifax Gibbet was a beheading machine used in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1286 until 1650. Under the town’s ancient Gibbet Law, anyone caught stealing goods worth thirteen and a half pennies or more could be tried by their neighbours and beheaded on the next market day, more than a century before the French guillotine.

So how did a Yorkshire market town of weavers and sheep end up cutting off its own neighbours’ heads in front of the Saturday market? Why did travellers pray to be delivered “from Hell, Hull and Halifax”? And why, when workmen dug up a forgotten stone platform in 1839, were two skeletons found nearby with their skulls lying two feet from their bodies?

In this episode:

• The Gibbet Law, and why stealing cloth from the tenter frames could cost you your life
• A trial with no judge and no lawyers, just sixteen local men
• The machine itself, where the whole crowd pulled the rope so that nobody was the executioner, and a stolen sheep could pull the pin
• The prisoners who escaped by dodging the blade and running for the Hebble Brook, and the man who came back
• A father and daughter beheaded together
• The last two men executed on Saturday 30 April 1650
• The Scottish earl said to have copied the machine, and then been beheaded by it

Content note: this episode describes executions by beheading and includes human remains.

Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the darker stories of the north of England, hosted by Lucy Sheridan.

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