The Gunpowder Plot and the start of the Bloody Code
Policing the Early Modern Town
By the early seventeenth century, English towns were larger and more crowded than in the medieval period, but the basic system of law enforcement had barely changed. There were still no professional police. In rural parishes, the unpaid parish constable kept order in the same way the medieval tithingman had. In towns, his counterpart was the town watchman, also known as the ‘Charley’ in later years, who patrolled the streets after dark, called the hour and raised the alarm if he saw a fire or disturbance.
Town watchmen were unpaid or low-paid, part-time and often elderly. They carried only a lantern, a staff and a rattle. They were not trained, not professional, and were widely mocked. In serious trouble, the public was still expected to raise the hue and cry, and parish constables were still the day-to-day enforcers. The state did not invent or fund a police force; it relied on the community.
Students sometimes describe town watchmen as the start of professional policing. They were not. Watchmen were unpaid or paid very little, served part-time, were locally appointed and had no training. Their job was to walk a beat at night and call out the hour — not to investigate crime. The first paid, organised force came over a century later, with the Bow Street Runners (1749) and then the Metropolitan Police (1829). Treat the watch as a community-based, amateur system, not as early professional police.
Punishment: Deterrence and Public Spectacle
Without a professional police force, early modern authorities relied on the threat of harsh, public punishment to deter crime. Corporal punishments — flogging, branding, ear-cropping, the pillory and the stocks — were used for theft, vagabondage and minor disorder. Capital punishment — usually hanging — was used for serious property crime as well as for murder, treason and arson. Burning was reserved for heresy and, until 1790, for women convicted of certain forms of treason.
Crucially, punishments were carried out in public. Tyburn in west London was the country’s most famous execution site, where huge crowds gathered on ‘hanging days’. The point was not just to punish the offender but to make every other observer think twice. This is what historians mean by deterrence in the early modern sense: terrifying spectacle as social control.
A New Punishment: Transportation
From around 1615, a new option began to appear in court records: transportation to the American colonies. Convicts were shipped across the Atlantic to work as indentured labour on plantations. For the state, transportation solved several problems at once: it removed criminals from England, it provided cheap labour for the colonies, and it could be presented as mercy — a life saved instead of taken on the gallows.
Transportation was not soft. Conditions on the Atlantic crossing were dangerous; many died. Indentured labour in colonial Virginia or Maryland was hard, hot work, and few transported convicts ever returned to England. Before 1718 transportation was used irregularly, as an act of royal mercy in place of hanging. The Transportation Act of 1718 then made it a normal sentence in its own right, and convicts were shipped to America in their thousands. The punishment regime was therefore beginning to layer alternatives to execution — though execution itself was still on the menu.
Early modern punishment was deliberately public and harsh: hanging, flogging, branding and the pillory were used to deter crime in the absence of a professional police force. Transportation to the American colonies, formalised from 1615, gave courts a harsh alternative to execution.
The Start of the Bloody Code
From the late seventeenth century onwards, Parliament steadily increased the number of offences that carried the death penalty. The 1723 Black Act alone created roughly fifty new capital offences, mostly aimed at poachers in disguise. By the 1810s, more than 200 different crimes were punishable by death — including stealing goods worth more than five shillings, cutting down a young tree, or being out at night with a blackened face. This system became known as the Bloody Code.
The Bloody Code was driven by fear of crime, by the absence of an effective police force, and above all by the wish to protect property. Parliament was dominated by landowners; capital punishment was their main tool against the poor. In practice, however, juries and judges often refused to convict, or commuted death sentences to transportation or pardon. The law on paper was savage; enforcement was uneven.
The Bloody Code is sometimes described as a purely eighteenth-century phenomenon. It is more accurate to say its growth began in the late seventeenth century — the law-making boom of the 1670s and 1680s laid the groundwork — and accelerated rapidly through the eighteenth, peaking in the early nineteenth century before being dismantled by Robert Peel in the 1820s. The Bloody Code is best described as a long process of expansion (c1688–1820s) rather than a single moment.
Case Study: The Gunpowder Plot, 1605
The most famous early modern treason case began at midnight on 5 November 1605. Acting on a tip-off, royal officials searched the cellars beneath the House of Lords and arrested Guy Fawkes, who was guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder. The plotters, led by Robert Catesby, were a group of English Catholics. Frustrated by James I’s refusal to grant Catholics greater toleration, they intended to blow up the king, his ministers and most of Parliament at the State Opening, then place a Catholic monarch on the throne.
An anonymous letter to a Catholic peer, Lord Monteagle, warned him to stay away. Robert Cecil, James I’s chief minister, used the warning to set the trap. Most of the plotters were either killed resisting arrest at Holbeche House or, like Fawkes, captured and brought to London. Fawkes was tortured on the rack until he gave up the names of his fellow conspirators — one of the few cases of legal torture in English history, used here under royal warrant because of the scale of the threat.
Trial, Punishment and the Treason Spectacle
In January 1606 the surviving plotters were tried for high treason at Westminster Hall. The verdict was never in doubt. They were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered — dragged through the streets on a hurdle, hanged until almost dead, cut down, disembowelled, and then cut into four pieces. The body parts were displayed at city gates and on London Bridge as a permanent warning.
The treason punishment was deliberately more elaborate than ordinary capital punishment because the offence was understood as an attack on the king himself, who in early modern theory ruled by divine right. Punishment for ordinary murder or theft was simply hanging. The Gunpowder Plotters were therefore made into a public spectacle precisely because they had attacked the political and religious order — a reminder of how punishment in this period worked as theatre as well as justice.
The Gunpowder Plotters were hanged, drawn and quartered in January 1606. The treason punishment was deliberately more brutal than ordinary capital punishment because treason was treated as an attack on the king and on God’s appointed political order.