11 Ridiculous Crimes That Carried The Death Penalty Before Queen Victoria

In the mid-18th century, especially, historians say there was “violent prejudice” against gypsies in England - from the top down. There were many laws that were intended to effectively banish them from the kingdom. A perfect example of this prejudice was making it a capital offense to even be in their company for an extended period of time - specifically, for more than one month.

It’s unclear why one month was the maximum exposure one could have to gypsies. What happened after that? As one writer notes, getting to the heart of the insanity of such a law, “Murder of the king carried the same penalty as being in the company of gypsies.”

Many landmarks were protected under the threat of capital punishment, but Westminster Bridge was especially safeguarded during the era of the “Bloody Code” because of its strategic importance. Dogs couldn’t even cross it. It opened in 1750 as only the second bridge in London that crossed the Thames.

A Compendious Digest of the Statute Law (1787) lists punishments for damaging London bridges, and Westminster was the only one where “willfully destroying or damaging” meant you were “guilty of felony without benefit of clergy.”

Specifically, this capital crime was intended for children between the ages of 7 and 14. To prove “strong evidence of malice,” prosecutors had to prove that the child didn’t have the “ability to tell right from wrong.”

There’s no evidence of children on the youngest end of this range actually being executed during the “Bloody Code” era, but there is a case from 1629. John Dean, who was 8 or 9 years old, was executed for arson.

Throughout the “Bloody Code” era, there were indeed cases of kids aged 12 to 18 who were executed for malicious crimes ranging from “housebreaking” to rape and murder. In 1908, the minimum age for execution was raised to 18.

No, this one has nothing to do with a cultural aversion to blackface or minstrelsy. The crime that Georgians thought was worthy of death was simply darkening your face at night. What’s so wrong with that?

The BBC says it made people think that you were a burglar. Simply looking like a burglar was enough to get you hanged.

Court documents from the Isle of Ely in 1821 reveal the thinking behind this one. A man executed for “cutting down young trees in a plantation” had also set fire to “corn-stacks,” and slashed “fine horses” and cows with a knife. But it was cutting down the trees that most offended the judge:

...cutting down young trees, from malice to the owner, is as great a proof of malignity in the criminal, and may be a much greater injury to the owner; for wealth may replace the corn and cattle, but the loss of the trees is irreparable, both to the owner and to the public. 

Criticized even in the mid-Georgian era for its “horrid severity,” this capital crime is just what it sounds like: An unmarried woman that doesn’t immediately disclose that she gave birth to a stillborn child is assumed to have killed the child, and therefore deserves to die. Married women, meanwhile, were spared because being married meant they were... too virtuous to do such a thing?

Thomas Jefferson was a critic of this particularly cruel and insane law in the “Bloody Code,” pointing out that it makes what is “only presumptive evidence of a murder, conclusive of that fact.”