Executions in Elizabethan London

First, Samuel Kiechel witnessed a hanging. He noted that the individuals who carried out public executions, such as hangings, were not officially appointed hangmen, as would be the case back home in Germany. Instead, the English have a reprehensible custom. When a criminal is sentenced to death by hanging, the execution is not performed by a hangman. Instead, a butcher is tasked with carrying out the sentence. Our traveller remarked that he believed an honest man was often chosen for this job and would feel uncomfortable performing it, enduring much sorrow because all of this was done in public.

Kiechel then described how public executions took place: The criminal was placed on a cart and driven from the prison through London to the site of execution outside the city. The condemned remained on the cart, a rope was placed around his neck and tied to the crossbeam of the gallows. Then, the cart was moved away. Friends and family of the condemned would come and pull on his feet and legs to hasten his suffocation.

The site of public hangings was outside the city at Tyburn. However, some particularly violent offences were punished by erecting gallows as close to the crime scene as possible. As Kiechel wrote, the condemned was loaded onto a cart and driven from the prison through Newgate down Holborn to the gallows at Tyburn, three miles from the city. Hangings were public spectacles and a source of entertainment. The condemned could expect to find the road and the site of execution crowded with people eager to watch. Kiechel had been one of the spectators, as his description is quite accurate, down to the point where friends and family pull on the legs of the condemned to hasten their demise.² However, I could not verify Kiechel’s observation that the hangmen were merely butchers ordered to carry out the executions.

Miscellaneous Observations

Finally, Samuel Kiechel made two observations about the inhabitants of the English capital. He remarked that the women of England are lovely and genuinely beautiful. He had never seen such women before. They do not wear makeup like those in Italy and other places. However, our traveller found their clothing to be somewhat graceless. While made from good linen and cloth, some women wore three petticoats layered on top of each other.

English fashion in a costume book dated 1581

We gain insight into how women in England dressed by examining costume books from the period. These books became popular in the late sixteenth century, featuring prints of individuals in their native attire from across Europe and beyond. The rise of costume books was linked to advances in cartography, similar to the “Civitates Orbis Terrarum”. Abraham Ortelius published the first modern atlas in 1570. Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, who published the “Civitates”, regarded their work as a supplement to Ortelius’s atlas. The creators of costume books saw their publications as another way to learn about the world — not its geography or towns, but its people.⁴

However, while costume books provide insight into how people dressed in the sixteenth century, the prints are not entirely representative. They suggest a uniform clothing style for individuals from different backgrounds (such as noblewomen, merchants, etc.) within a specific land, region, or city. However, no standard dress code conventions existed for these groups. Fashion styles and clothing items fluctuated, and individual differences were always present. The costumes depicted in the books primarily reflected the choices of the printmaker.⁵

Despite this, the images undeniably help illustrate how individuals in Samuel Kiechel’s time dressed. For this purpose, it is of little importance whether the costumes are idealised representations of the attire worn by different layers of society. Although the publishers of the costume books may have exercised creativity in their dress designs, their understanding and source material could only stem from the world around them — what they observed personally or in other publications.

The publishers of the “Civitates Orbis Terrarum” utilised costume books, incorporating depictions of people dressed in local fashion in their city views.

Costume Print of English Women in the “Civitates Orbis Terrarum”

Kiechel’s second observation noted that when a guest entered the house of a London citizen, whether for business or leisure, he was greeted by the man of the house. The women and maids of the household also welcomed him. Their custom involved embracing the women and kissing them. Should someone decline this custom, he was perceived as uncivilised and rude. According to Kiechel, this tradition was also observed in the Netherlands.

Leaving London

With the trip to Ireland and Scotland cancelled, our traveller was eager to leave England. He planned to travel to Antwerp but had heard that the route was considered dangerous due to the war in the Netherlands. Kiechel had to search for quite some time before he found a Dutchman from Antwerp whose parents still resided there. They agreed to travel together and eventually found another man from Antwerp, a messenger, to join them.

After two months in London, Samuel Kiechel left the city on 14 November aboard a large boat to Gravesend. The German travellers he had met in London and spent much time with accompanied him to the port in Billingsgate to see him off. On the boat were 200 passengers, and they arrived in Gravesend three hours later.